EDGE Philadelphia

"There’s not enough we do to frame these issues in terms that ordinary people can get," Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig states in the hour-long lecture on what has been dubbed "free culture" on a DVD extra for director Brett Gaylor’s RiP: A Remix Manifesto.

Thus, the expected grunts of liberal critiques proclaiming this film too simplified a tract, too unconcerned with building new models for commerce and art, and too hung up on metaphors of dancing partygoers as soldiers against the oppressive forces of corporate America ring slightly hollow.

That Rip brings along Greg Gillis aka Girl Talk, mashup artist and perhaps the most contentious artist in modern music, whose music elicits either frustrated groans or overzealous exaltation at every turn, is proof positive though that Gaylor has heeded Lessig’s words carefully.

Because Girl Talk’s party music appeals to a sense of recognition inherent in the illegal samples Gillis uses to make his music. To merely listen to his music with these ears is to participate in a dialogue with the voices of dominance.

Gillis’s own ideas about artistry versus deejaying and originality versus thievery are, as Gaylor points out at the start of the film, irrelevant.

For it’s not just auteurs, elites, and Girl Talks who need to be protected for predatory corporations who’ve built a cottage industry socialized into our legal system out of the idea of intellectual property.

All of us who engage with culture in any way are at risk of being financially raped by the czars of copyright. The corporate stranglehold on media not only threatens the power to create in the image of the craven idols carved for use to worship. It also completely corrodes the channels of communication in the inter-global dialogue about shared experience.

Gaylor travels around the world to show how U.S. based corporate bullies are trying to impose their intellectual property laws on the third world.

The same ones that came around trying to eradicate indigenous cultures to paint a Western ("globalized") face on the developing world now have a thing or two to say about preserving cultural artifacts. Funny, huh?

Fortunately, crusaders like Lessig have warned many of these places about shaking hands with the devil and they’ve built their own alternative legal creative culture (taking cues from Lessig’s own Creative Commons licensing).

In the meantime, America remains trapped in a legal nightmare where drug patents prevent doctors from curing patients, fear of lawsuit is causing original nitrate reels of classic films to dissolve into dust, and families across the country are legally guilty of a crime when they sing "Happy Birthday To You" at the social gatherings at Chuck E. Cheese.

It’s an Orwellian prohibition on language in the post-Gutenberg galaxy, the language of multimedia.

Negativland’s Mark Hosler, who has made a career out of remixing the mass media interface (Negativland were the ones who coined the term "culture jamming") enunciates in the film the rarely-articulated argument that nobody ever asked to be inundated with the thousands of hours of inescapable advertisements, incessant background music, mandated visual iconography, and various other detritus of culture consumption.

The ownership class has infected our subconscious and shaped our dreams, and now, Gaylor and the free culture movement argue, they’re trying to limit the ways that we can interpret those dreams. The aim, it would appear, is complete mental colonization.

Gaylor arrays clear dichotomies between what he dubs the copyRight and the copyLeft, and while there may be something a bit grating about the David v. Goliath narrative, his points are often made crisply and effectively.

The film is fantastically edited from innumerable clips, whose illegal-ish inclusion teeters the rather tenuous tight rope of fair use. With a music video mashup sensibility, the visuals are constantly stimulating, with plenty of clever or spot-on references included for the wired community, who won’t be too shocked by anything being said in the film.

Best of all though may be the audio histories, which traces Led Zeppelin back to Muddy Waters and The Verve’s "Bittersweet Symphony", built around a loop from Rolling Stones producer Andrew Loog Oldham’s still out-of-print orchestral version of "The Last Time" which cost The Verve 100% of all royalties on its biggest hit, back to its traditional folk origins.

Equally as fascinating as the film’s style are its arguments, such as the ones proposed by Science Fiction author and Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow. Doctorow suggests that Walt Disney was the world’s foremost remixer before his business became the world’s most possessive and litigious brand-nazi.

He also illustrates convincingly how Napster users amassed the largest library of recorded sound in human history in a couple of months for free, without the assistance of the billions of dollars in ass-kissing grants and political back-scratching that an institution like the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian might need to pull something like that off.

And this DVD is just one version of the film that exists. Several years back, Gaylor created Open Source Cinema, where he has encouraged users to remix the raw footage from the film into their own variations.

He is even offering the film as a pay-what-you-will download a la Radiohead, attempting to open up the channels of distribution as wide as possible.

It’s well-worth a couple educational hours, particularly since the stakes are so high and getting higher. In fact, Jammie Thomas, a working class Native American mom featured in RiP who was sued by the RIAA for downloading 24 songs that any one could find on Youtube for free in ten minutes or less, found her damages raised from $222,000 to $1.92 million in the retrial that occurred between this film’s postproduction and its DVD release.

Thomas’s crime, as she states in the film, was never in downloading the music, but in refusing to settle. Court-mandated donations sure make the best bailout gifts.