Conversations About the Internet #4: Brett Gaylor
My interview with Brett Gaylor about filesharing and remix culture, the fourth installment of the Conversations About The Internet series, is up at the Rumpus. Excerpt:
Brett Gaylor is a filmmaker who argues that [the reaction to filesharing and the threat to remix culture] are directly related, and he has made a film, largely based on the work of Lawrence Lessig, that calls for reform in intellectual property law: RiP: A Remix Manifesto. The Manifesto of the title consists of four points: 1. Culture always builds on the past; 2. The past always tries to control the future; 3. Our future is becoming less free; 4. To build free societies, you must limit the control of the past.
As those four points imply, the film moves from the special case of music into much wider issues raised by existing intellectual property law, touching “foreign trade, the kind of democracy we want to create,” and so forth. Since this interview was a conversation about the Internet, we minimized discussion of these wider issues — for example, Gaylor makes a compelling case that patent law is stifling medical innovation — in favor of discussing those issues that relate directly to the Internet.
But we discuss one other thing too: the way the film itself actually embodies these ideas about copyright and remix culture. Not only is the film released under a Creative Commons license; it was created alongside his innovative Open Source Cinema project — a website where documentary filmmakers can post the raw footage from their projects, and invite an audience to remix the footage and contribute it to the site. Gaylor found this collaborative process so successful with RiP that he has included dozens of viewer-contributed sequences in his many intermediate “final” cuts of the film. Infected with the remix spirit, Gaylor can’t seem to resist tweaking his own film with ever more contributions as time goes on.
posted: 09 November 23
under: Open Folio