RiP: a remix manifesto was six years in the making, a process that involved following Girl Talk, a musician who remixes existing sounds and songs to create new music, and then consulting with experts about what is in the public domain and what is allowable under fair use.

After six years of following the struggle of the new media generation to protect the public domain, director Brett Gaylor, head of new media at EyeSteelFilms in Montreal, learned much about what clips and samples are legally allowable under the terms of fair use.

‘We can get away with a lot more in this movie because this movie is about rights,’ says Gaylor of his doc, a proponent of the movement to rethink intellectual property. Since his doc focuses on sampling and the reworking of pre-existing music and footage, he had to use examples of this in order to articulate his point properly. This allowed him to use Rolling Stones and Disney songs under the terms of fair use, while an independent filmmaker wouldn’t normally be able to afford such clips.

‘To actually try to clear Girl Talk’s [work] would be a multimillion-dollar endeavor for anyone else,’ says Gaylor. ‘But we can use more of that because we’re actually making commentary on that material.’

Fair use (or fair dealing) is a murky concept, full of gray areas and completely open to interpretation. Anyone who has ever had to clear music or film clips can see the dodgy area Gaylor was entering by taking on this project. Because of this, Gaylor and EyeSteel (Up the Yangtze) had a team of lawyers on board going through the film moment by moment, clip by clip, to make sure each second that wasn’t cleared could fall under fair use.

‘My feet were held to the fire by these experts in the field of copyright, and it was a really cool experience, because if they thought my argument didn’t hold up legally, nine times out of 10 it didn’t hold up artistically either,’ says Gaylor.

For example, in an early edit there was a moment where Arnold Schwarzenegger was ‘chasing’ Gaylor, as Schwarzenegger is a proponent of expanding copyright law. The scene was made using a clip from Terminator 2. ‘They said, ‘You could probably get away with making the same point without using clips from Terminator 2,’ and it was obvious that it was artistically indulgent as well,’ says Gaylor. ‘It helped make a better film to collaborate with the right legal team.’

As part of the film’s argument that more media should be made freely available to the public in order to create new art, Gaylor has made his own doc available to viewers to re-edit in their own way. Gaylor created opensourcecinema.org, where viewers can access scenes from the film to make their own ‘mash-ups,’ and Gaylor plans to re-edit his film to include the new footage.

This week, to accompany the release of the film in Canadian theaters, the site will launch online editing software so that viewers can edit the film right on the site, without needing their own editing software.

‘This is the beginning of the conversation… A lot of people have different opinions, so my answer is, if you want to add to the conversation, you can do that,’ says Gaylor. ‘We’re going to give them the tools so you’ll be able to edit in the window. But also because we’ve released the film under a Creative Commons licence, we’ve made it clear that it’s okay to remix this film.’

From Realscreen Daily