Girl Talk and the Copyleft movement

The Internet is like a candy store. We’re all only counter high compared to its delicious heights. There is no cash register. Nowhere to pay. You can grab anything. Welcome to candy heaven.
More appropriately, the Internet is like an arts and crafts store. This is the best arts and crafts store in the world because the brushes you can buy range from type sets and photographs, all the way up to discographies and entire movies. Once again, there is no cash register. Grab, grab, grab. Welcome to media heaven.
Showing next week at Cinema Politica is a film about this media heaven and the buggers who want to shut the store down. RiP!: A remix manifesto is Canadian Brett Gaylor’s Michael Mooresque argument for changes to our copyright laws.
The basis of Gaylor’s argument lies in the retrograded nature of copyright. Yes, the law gets in the way of your stealing music, movies and whatever else can be copied, but Gaylor argues it also stunts the possibility of positive comment, greater equality and, dare one say, the avant-guard reality of the Internet mash-up.
Nothing in recent art has felt more up-and-coming then what is playing on Youtube or scrolling across 4chan. What people have done to Britney, to Radiohead, to Obama and even to their pet cuddly whatevers is groundbreaking. We are now more than ever able to take entire pieces of media, ones that are charged with magnanimous amounts of cultural meaning and “comment” on them in a quick and easy way.
In RiP Gaylor follows Gregg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk. He’s a bio-engineer by day and a sweaty, half-naked DJ by night. He electrifies crowds with his superior mash-up skills. He’ll take a bunch of songs, cut what he wants from them and mix it into a track. In each one he breaks about 20 copyrights, so many, that what he creates is completely different that any of the original sounds.
As Girl Talk expresses, a mash-up is just the common act of using what you have to make something new, and there’s really nothing brand new about that process.
As an engineer he understands the nature of creating: you build with products and ideas already established and try and apply them to new needs. What he does on his laptop for froshy teens everywhere is no different. He’s got the kids dancing to Thunderstruck again, although it’s laced with some new beats and back-up tracks.
As you can imagine, the RIAA isn’t too hot for Girl Talk. Anyone who owns or lobbies for copyright puts money in to keep on making money. They don’t make a dime off of guys like him or the guy who streams torrent files like it’s hot air in winter.
But RiP isn’t some delinquent cry against the man; it’s a very well constructed argument for changes to copyright law. The history is clearly exposed and a certain weight is granted to the importance of creative property laws. Gaylor basically argues that the laws had their time and place, and now they’ve become outdated and ultimately harmful.
Although a mash-up DJ like Girl Talk illustrates a strong point – that what he does is technically a crime although it’s really just new art – the more important issue is only touched upon in the film. Copyright not only stunts the mash-up artist in you, it also stunts science.
Ideas, sometimes extremely vague, are being copyrighted by companies and research and development firms are often locked off from advancing further because of them. The film ponders briefly what could have been accomplished if these barriers weren’t there. At this point, the film really makes you feel the negative effect of over-protection. In this context, the word “stealing” takes on a new tone. To imagine a scientist “stealing” to make a cure for cancer sounds pretty dignified.
So, the question of the film is whether copyright laws are actually out there for the greater good, whether we need copyright laws to actually protect anything worth protecting. Will the arts and sciences suffer if no one can ensure their capitol on a project? Or will artists and scientists continue to break new ground?
You’ll leave H-110 contemplating heavily next Monday if you check it out. The film is engaging. It’s really a must-see as so many critics have already said. The mixture of live footage, bumping tracks and a strong narrative paired with a full on media collage made of cultural bits and pieces really makes you question the traditions of copyright. The film is a relentless media rebel that tries to recruit you and it’s fun the whole way through.
It will probably make you want to stick it to the man.