RiP!: A Remix Manifesto" is a 2008 open source documentary directed by Brett Gaylor. It was developed collaboratively online at Open Source Cinema, and Gaylor has left it on the Open Source Cinema site and encouraged others to remix it.

The film, running about 80 minutes, is framed primarily around the work of Girl Talk, a remix musician who has become one of several major symbols of the remix/copyright reform movement. Lawrence Lessig chips in as well, giving the framing some intellectual heft, and Cory Doctorow and a handful of others drop in from time to time.

I always struggle a bit when I try to evaluate films about copyright issues - since I know the literature inside and out, it's hard to just watch and appreciate them without getting hung up on minor problems. So I'm going to quickly toss out my one big complaint and then move on to the things I think the film does really well.

Complaint: Ambiguous Use of "Copyleft"

It may be time for me to give up on this little battle, but Gaylor, like Lessig before him, continues to broaden the meaning of the word copyleft in a way that, at the least, creates a lot of confusion, especially for those coming from either an academic or a software background. For Gaylor, copyleft seems to include any movement, organization, practice, or licensing scheme that loosens the corporate stranglehold on copyrighted works. It's a catch-all term for the opposite of the RIAA.

In the open source software movement, on the other hand, copyleft refers to a very specific licensing characteristic: a copyleft license is one that requires that parties only redistribute the software under the same license under which they received the software. It is a "viral" attribute, which prevents open source software from being removed from the commons. It is fairly analogous to the "Share-Alike" option in the Creative Commons.

I greatly prefer "commons-based approaches" as a catch-all, but I recognize that copyleft has a lot more zing.

The Good Stuff

However, on the whole I really enjoyed the film. Two key strengths stand out, particulary when considered in comparison to another recent film, Good Copy Bad Copy (2007).

First, RiP! keeps it simple. While the implications of its topic are incredibly far-reaching, Gaylor does a great job of keeping it focused and, in doing so, keeping the message tight and easy to follow. Mickey Mouse, the villain of the copyleft movement, gets a splash of attention, as does the tragic fact that US patent law is quite literally killing people all over the world, by pricing them out of essential medications. However, these issues don't distract from the primary message -- that remix is art, it is a tradition, it is amazing, and that the restrictive copyright regime we currently have is a 20th century anomaly, an artifact of rapid technological change and media consolidation.

This is a much different approach than that taken in another recent film Good Copy Bad Copy (2007), and also a number of recent books including Lessig's Remix, James Boyle's The Public Domain and David Bollier's Viral Spiral (and, to some extent, my own work in From Coding to Community). There is always a temptation, in these sorts of works, to tell "the whole story" - the history of the printing press and copyright legislation; the history of open source software, including gratuitous interviews with Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, and Linus Torvalds); the history of the Internet, Napster, and the Pirate Bay; and details of each stage in Disney's grotesque efforts to extend copyright terms forever. While all of this context is important, it doesn't need to be repeated in every work.

Second, and somewhat similarly, RiP! has really positive messaging. Good Copy Bad Copy, while a wonderful film that puts together a pretty solid argument, allowed words like "pirate" and "piracy" to infiltrate its messaging to such a degree that even a die-hard advocate like myself was made a bit uncomfortable. It reminds me a bit of how the free software movement, by clinging so strongly to the "hacker" moniker, permanently stigmatizes itself as, at best, a marginal fringe group and, at worst, as just plain criminal.

In RiP!, however, there are no pirates or hackers. There are just artists and fans, trying to make and hear amazing music. Copyright has always been about maximizing creativity, and by focusing on the negative impact that our oppressive copyright regime is making on the creative process, Gaylord's film is far more successful than have been prior efforts in this area.