In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

The films central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil's Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.

A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle.

Which side of the ideas war are you on?

Originally posted by subject x
I think that if someone wants to "create" something artistic out of someone else's art for themselves, that's fine. If they want to make money off of it, they should have to pay a percentage of the profit to the original artist.

That being said, I also think that if you want to make art, make it. Don't chop up someone else's work to do it. To me, those who do "mash ups" are just wannabes who don't have enough talent to actually create their own art.

Of course, then you get into the issue of most of today's music being not very creative in the first place, which begs the question: if you make a mash-up out of a bunch of computer generated crap that kinda sucked in the first place, what makes you think your end result will be any better. Garbage in, garbage out.

But the most apalling thing about the whole issue is that the masses seem to like it. When the public will pay for crap that was made by pasting a bunch of other crap together, well, that's a pretty sad statement about people in general.

Originally posted by JoshNorton
To a large extent, that's what the Creative Commons license is all about. The majority of things that I've seen released under CC allow for the creation of non-commercial derivative works. Under existing copyright law, things such as fan fiction are technically illegal, even if they're not sold. By an author placing his original work in a CC-BY-NC-SA license, he or she is explicitly giving permission for others to come play in the world they created.

Then I'm guessing you have a pretty dim view of Walt Disney? Most of the major Disney films are merely retellings of traditional fables, folk-lore and other older stories. How about Star Wars? A bit of Joseph Campbell, some Kurosawa and some WWII aerial combat footage... Crap, right?

Parody and commentary. A significant part of post-modernism is the dissecting of popular culture and reinterpreting it, showing it to us in a new light and possibly using it to tell us something new. Heck, I can appreciate a Weird Al parody of a song when I would have absolutely no interest in listening to the original.

Not at all. That's actually a pretty close-minded way of looking at the world. Quotes can be used to illustrate a point, to criticize, or to raise awareness or make a social commentary.