RIP: A Remix Manifesto

I recently watched a documentary film about copyright and remix culture. The creator of the film wanted people to remix his own work which he has made the film available so everyone can access it. He encourages people to remix his work which I think is so different compared to now due to hoe strict copy right laws can be. The film focuses on a mashup musician called girl talk who creates a lot of mashups of songs which are very popular.

Some of the points raised throughout the documentary such as ‘culture always builds on the past’ which in I totally agree with as they talked about Walt Disney for example. Walt Disney would take exiting stories and adapt them which he did with steamboat willie example. This was due to these characters being public demand and it wasn’t even seen wrong. However, Girl Talk’s mashups are seen as wrong and illegal because he is using other people’s work. Another point which was raised in the documentary was ‘our future is becoming less free’ its obvious that we are more restricted when it comes to creating. Companies become more involved whcih can prevent people creating what they want which might include material that someone else has already made.

I enjoyed the documentary as I actually didn’t really realise that copyright was such a big issue that people were actually getting sued and not even giving the artist the money but the company which just had the right to publish their works, so in the end the artist didn’t even get any of the money from the people which were sued. It looks like copyright will always be an issue I think we just need to be creative in using copyrighted work.