In setting up Open Source Cinema, I was inspired by the open source software process – software that people can contribute to and change and collectively build. And I thought that idea applied really well to documentary film. I thought, why not set up something for collaboratively-produced truth?
Napster, the first widely popular peer-to-peer filesharing service, introduced the whole world to filesharing, which had already been happening in corners of the Internet, and in digital culture generally, from the beginning. Until the late 90s, it had been a marginal activity requiring technical knowhow, at that time mostly carried out in the arcane reaches of Usenet. Napster and similar services made it possible for anybody to share his or her entire music collection with any other user of the service, without needing any special skill.
As is well-known, the recording industry realized this posed a potentially serious threat to their business model, and the trade group representing the major record labels, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), sued Napster in 1999, and then in 2003 began a program of suing ordinary consumers for their filesharing activities, most infamously filing suit against grandmothers and small children. (The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2008 that the RIAA had discontinued this program.) Another potential target of lawsuits from the RIAA (and related trade groups) is a group of creators who, working with digital materials, use prior works as source material, just as creators have throughout history: taking an element here, an element there, and combining these borrowed elements into entirely new, individual works. This kind of culture — an increasingly-significant form called remix culture — is created under the perpetual threat of legal action, though it must be said that such action is very rare.
Brett Gaylor is a filmmaker who argues that these two phenomena — 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. I’ve seen three versions — an early pre-release screener, a screening this past summer that was hosted by the San Francisco Film Society, and the Hulu version — and each was subtly different from the other two. He has vowed to release an all-time final version in 2010.
Gaylor lives in Montreal, but I caught him by phone at his childhood home on Galiano Island, where he regularly retreats to think and to relax. The first ten minutes of our interview was periodically interrupted by strange noises and popping sounds. I thought the connection was getting flaky, but it turned out that he was simply holding his wriggling infant daughter in one arm, and the noises were her laughter, and the accidental whacking of her father’s head and telephone with her flailing arms.
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The Rumpus: What was the genesis of this film? Did you set out to make a film version of Free Culture?
Brett Gaylor: Not exactly. The route was a little more circuitous than that, although that might have been easier than the path we ultimately took. Originally, I was really interested in peer-to-peer file sharing, not only as it pertained to the music industry, but also how the phenomenon was going to affect the world economy. When you saw how digital goods could be so easily copied and shared on the net, you knew this was going to really upset existing business models. So I wanted to make a film that would explore those ideas.
But even before that, I was really involved in digital culture. I grew up here on Galiano Island, which is a very tiny place, and dialing a BBS was the only way for me to access the larger world. For anybody about my age (I’m 32) who was interested in technology when they were growing up, to be on the internet then, twenty years ago, meant using your modem to dial a BBS.
Rumpus: I remember those! I’m your exact contemporary, and I had the same experience in the Silicon Valley, dialing a local BBS.
Gaylor: Right, and anybody who had that experience of being on the early Internet, knew that this was going to change the world and would disrupt things. As that began to happen, I wanted to make a film about that change, and which specifically became about how we were going to have to rethink copyright. It was about a 6-year process to make the film, and it took me several years at the beginning just to find the nuance and the flavor of activism I was interested in. It sort of crystallized when I discovered Lawrence Lessig’s writing and Free Culture, and so obviously one of my early interviews and characters was him. But I struggled for a long time on how to make a film that wasn’t just a talking heads survey film.
Rumpus: I guess that’s where Girl Talk comes in.
Gaylor: That’s right. I’d been aware of his music for many years, because I often used it in demos, and even back around 2003 or 2004 there were little clips of him online, and they were like, this skinny guy playing to ten people in a laundromat in Kentucky. And I loved that, but I didn’t know it was going to turn into what it did. Then once he came through Montreal, and I just thought, “well, he’s here and I like his music, so why don’t I film a show, and maybe it will show up as an interview somewhere in the film.”
And at that show, there was one of those moments when all these people run up on stage, and it turned into this amazing party. I thought, okay, this is great, because you can see, embodied in that act of the fans jumping up on stage, the breaking of that traditional boundary between an artist and a fan.
Rumpus: It was a visual metaphor for everything your film is about.
Gaylor: Yes, exactly, and you struggle with that so often in documentary filmmaking, especially if you want to make something theatrical, as I did. By then I’d raised money, and had managed to convince people that there’s something to this debate and people will want to watch it, but I was still looking for that subject you could follow over time. After that show, that’s when we engaged with Girl Talk, and then told Lessig we wanted to try and portray his ideas cinematically, not just as a talking-heads picture, and got him to do one last lecture on the subject at Stanford.
Rumpus: Since it seems you didn’t start out with Lessig’s ideas in mind, at what point did you develop the manifesto that structures the film?
Gaylor: The manifesto itself was one of the last things I did, actually. We spent a long time in the edits, about ten months, and we were still missing something to tie it all together. When we were brainstorming titles, I thought, why not A Remix Manifesto? I liked the ring of it, and my editor’s reaction was: “okay then, what’s the manifesto?” And I didn’t know. So I took ten days, went back to Galiano Island, and did nothing but think about that.
And I realized, in a way, that the manifesto was already embedded in the film — it had subconsciously had been there the whole time. It was based on something that Lessig had written before Free Culture, this speech about how creativity always builds on the past. So I tweaked that a little, and my version gave me the wire on which to hang my personal take on the film. Because prior to that, it hadn’t quite gelled, and it didn’t seem motivated.
Rumpus: I’d like to talk about your Open Source Cinema project, where you post your own footage and invite people to remix it. When did you get the idea for this project and set it up?
Gaylor: Pretty much immediately, while we were making the film, I was inspired by the open source software process – software that people can contribute to and change and collectively build. And I thought that applied really well to documentary film for a number of reasons. There’s this notion that democracy happens under bright lights, and again there’s that famous quote from Linus Torvalds: “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” So I thought, why not set up something for collaboratively-produced truth?
This was before Wikipedia, though Wikipedia really proved you can have this sort of collective wisdom happen. But at the time I thought of it, it was more or less impossible. There were no large video sharing sites like YouTube, there were no social networks, so at the time I did it to the extent I could do it, and I would kind of put my rushes up under Creative Commons licenses, and invite people to edit them around themes.
What ended up happening, was that as soon as Girl Talk came into the project, Open Source Cinema really took off, because not only did Girl Talk have an existing fanbase, but those fans were already involved with digital culture and remixing.
Rumpus: I understand that many sequences in the film are remixes contributed by fans. Could you name a prominent example of that?
Gaylor: Yes. The rotoscoped Girl Talk concert sequence is a great example of that. There were three levels of collaboration there: I posted my original rushes, and then one person made a short video out of those, and then like seventy kids got together and each rotoscoped five frames of that video and compiled it. And actually there was a fourth level, because that version was remixed as well, and we used one of those remixes in the film. And we’ve used a number of such sequences throughout.
But this experiment was just the first step. What I want to do now with Open Source Cinema, is make it into a collaborative platform that any documentary filmmaker could use, anybody who wants to invite that sort of participation.
Rumpus: So you’re actively trying to get other filmmakers on board?
Gaylor: Yeah, that’s sort of the focus of my next work: trying to bring other filmmakers into creating with their audiences, and to promote the idea that sharing can be good and sharing can actually bear a lot of creative fruit.
Rumpus: So you have decided to do this with the source material of all your feature films, release it on this platform?
Gaylor: I would think so. For sure. It’s been very rewarding.
Rumpus: Some people might think you’re getting free labor from your fans.
Gaylor: A lot of people think this would result in a reduction of work, but that hasn’t been my experience. I think you’re at least doubling your work when you invite a lot of other people into your project. But it’s the way I’ve always enjoyed creating. Filmmaking is different from the other arts. Remember Orson Welles: “A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.” That has always been true of filmmaking, it’s a very collaborative thing. I just like the idea that with this approach, the audience has some input, and it’s a way to keep things fresh. And I’ve also had the experience of people watching the film and coming up afterwards to say: “hey, I made that thing!” or “that’s me in the frame!” It’s cool! I’ll definitely do it with all my future projects.
Rumpus: For a moment I’d like to ask you about the difference between filesharing and creative reuse. Although I agree with your general perspective, I have to admit I was a little surprised at the way the film appears to conflate filesharing and the wholesale theft of creative work, with remixing and creative reuse of prior works. Those seem to me entirely different things. Are you making the argument that filesharing should also be 100% decriminalized?
Gaylor: Well, I was focusing on documenting the excessive reaction to filesharing, rather than trying to make some kind of blanket argument about it. Is filesharing going to be a technology that sticks around? I don’t know anything about that. But I do know that there was a real opportunity missed in the reaction. Rather than celebrate the technology that allowed this instant access to recorded music, and to potentially bottomless markets, it was really vilified. The way they approached it, was like throwing people in jail for jaywalking, and it really hasn’t helped the case for paying for recorded music.
In the film I definitely look at that, and examine how the reaction to filesharing has departed from historical reactions to new technologies. There are so many examples of technologies that have disrupted existing business models, particularly in music and in film. Take the radio, the player piano, the VCR, cable television — initially these were all very disruptive, and there were lawsuits involved, but in time legislators would dictate how to solve the problem. The radio will never go go away no matter how often the American Federation of Musicians goes on strike. So they established payment structures, and from then on people worked within that system. And in my view, that’s what needs to happen with peer to peer filesharing. There needs to be some kind of collective licensing system set up. Perhaps it could be a percentage of an ISP bill or something.
Rumpus: In Free Culture, Lessig cites the example of cable TV.
Gaylor: Sure, or maybe some other kind of arrangement will win out. The reason I chose to compare those in the film, that it’s this kind of extreme reaction to those technologies that is threatening the remix culture. And not only the remix culture, but any business models that may emerge from these technologies. Because there’s still a lot of money to be made from the existing structure.
The thing is, when we upload content — mashups, remixes, political satire, any of that kind of stuff – to Facebook and YouTube, if it’s taken down, it’s because of this reaction to filesharing, not because of an objection to remix culture per se. So even though you might make a moral distinction between the two activities, they are closely related. That’s why the film goes into them that way. I agree that the filesharing side is more morally uncertain, and on the other side I think that a lot of people are happy to say that remixing is a valid art form and there should be room in the law for it. But people, particularly those who work in creative industries, aren’t so sure how to deal with filesharing.
You know something, this has happened in the distribution of this very film. I’m dealing with a lot of people who are wondering how we’re going to make any money on this thing, or even just recoup the money, when it’s right there on the bloody Pirate Bay! But my answer to that has always been, it’s not piracy I need to be afraid of; it’s obscurity. The problem is not that people are ripping off my film, it’s that nobody’s heard of my film, it’s a tiny little film. And that’s why I was very insistent that my film be released under Creative Commons license, and that it be free to travel through those networks.
Rumpus: When you said you were trying to highlight the excessive reaction to filesharing, I thought of another really powerful metaphorical moment in the film: the scene where an RIAA lobbyist was bullying a group of kids. Not only was it a very direct metaphor for the whole situation – the music industry, suing children – I was really struck by something else: the way he said, as an aside, that he wished he owned the rights to the idea of love. Which was a subtle but chilling moment for me. It made me recognize how extreme the thinking around intellectual property can get, that there are in fact people who, if they could, would try to monopolize expressions of one of the most basic and universal of human experiences, for financial profit.
Gaylor: That guy was delivered from heaven, or filmmaking heaven anyway. That was actually outside the Grokster hearings, which was a Supreme Court case in 2005, that a lot of people went to and protested, and that guy was actually from the American Federation of Musicians, or Songwriter’s Federation, I think. He was a lobbyist, but not from the RIAA, but he was in fact trucked in by the RIAA, along with a lot of other musicians, to speak for them. Because the RIAA wanted to try and come across as representing the poor struggling songwriter. He was really just kidding around: “I don’t own the rights to the concept of love — I wish I did, I’d be a rich man,” but yeah, it was a telling moment. And the kids are staring at him like, “I don’t understand a thing that’s coming out of your mouth.” This guy could be saying “Did you know that you’re supposed to be paying for air? There’s supposed to be a box installed in your house that pays for your air, and I don’t know if your parents have been paying for the air, but they should be,” it was sort of like that, and these kids were like, WHAT. As if, just because you wrote a song, you should be —
Rumpus: That we owe you a living.
Gaylor: Yes, basically. For me, it was more telling that this was an industry that was really out of touch with, not just what’s going on, but actually with their place in the world. Here was this guy who writes jingles, and he believes that he has the right to dictate a really fundamental part of our economy, that touches not just his jingle writing, but also foreign trade, the kind of democracy that we want to create, a lot more than just his little songs. And so, I think it was, for me, more an indication of that, than of the extremism you mention.
But that does exist too. The fellow we talked to in Washington, Bruce Lehmann, was a lot more along those lines. In the Clinton administration, the official thinking he spearheaded was that if we can move up the value chain, so to speak, and stop putting primary importance on the manufacture of goods, how far abstracted can we go? Can we patent life itself? For me that was really a lot more scary. And depressing, when you realize that much of the economic situation we’re in right now has come as a result of that kind of thinking, where they started from the idea of dismantling manufacturing because we’re all going to get rich off these ideas. That really made me realize that copyright, and intellectual property law in general, is a much bigger issue than just the entertainment industry.
Rumpus: Given that the film is so much about digital culture, what kind of digital distribution are you pursuing? Are you going to let it be distributed entirely for free, or are you pursuing paid downloads as well?
Gaylor: Well, this has been really complicated because of the way film rights are handled from country to country. The world has been carved up into a lot of different territories. So one distribution company might have the download rights for one country but not for another. But as a matter of fact, the US is really the only mature download market for movies. The global rights for the film are with the National Film Board of Canada, because they’re our producer. They put in enough money to make the film, and the tradeoff was that they would take the global rights. So they sold download rights to companies in some countries that just don’t have the infrastructure to support paid downloads, and Apple is really the only real player in that space, and in some countries, like Canada for instance, you can’t really get in there. You can’t access it. So that’s been frustrating a little bit. But like I said, in the States they took this whole innovative approach of doing a pay-what-you-can download, and it’s also on iTunes and Hulu. In the States, you have more opportunity to see what’s really going on in the digital marketplace. The sad state of affairs of digital distribution is that there’s really only one mature market, which is frustrating too. Even though it’s rising at a fast clip, digital downloads of movies is still less than 10% of all sales.
Rumpus: You have a lot of people on Hulu complaining that you don’t present a balanced viewpoint.
Gaylor: Come on, it’s a manifesto. It says so right in the title. I didn’t even want to pretend that it would be “balanced,” whatever that would mean in this case. Manifestoes are not unbiased, and they don’t tend to be subtle things. They don’t try and play the devil’s advocate: they present the views of one side.
Rumpus: Speaking of manifestoes, I love the Cannibalist Manifesto from 1928 that you quote at the end, after telling the story that when the first Portuguese bishop arrived in Brazil, the natives were so impressed with the word of God, they ate the man in order to fully assimilate the power of the Catholic Church: “Only cannibalism unites us, socially, economically, philosophically. From the French Revolution to romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist Revolution, we’re moving right along.”
Gaylor: I found that very early in the research. I knew that Brazil was going to have a place in the film early on. The Cannibalist Manifesto is quite a poetic statement on remixing, but it was an inspiration for sure.
Rumpus: So on that subject, do you think it’s ultimately going to be a place like Canada, or a place like Brazil, that finally poses the most effective challenge to the extremes of US IP law?
Gaylor: As a Canadian, I’d like to think it would come from Canada, but unfortunately, we’re in a situation where, because we’re a cultural importer from the United States, we kind of have to toe whatever line the US demands. But you never know. Things are changing, and people are beginning to realize what is at stake, and Canada has been dragging its feet on copyright for so many years because it’s a really contentious issue. So maybe we’ll have a chance to get it right up here.
But realistically, I think the most serious challenges will come from the developing world. This was explained to me quite succinctly by Claudio Prado, who is a digital culture policymaker in Brazil; he said, “you know, in the developing world, we didn’t have the luxuries of the 20th century. So we actually moved right from the 19th century into the 21st century, because we were locked out of the 20th century.” The 20th century was exclusively the realm of the first world, and all of the money and economic structures that were set up during that time, the rest of the world was excluded from. So they’re not feeling the same pain of having those industries taken away from them, because they didn’t actually get to participate in that economy. As a result, they’re actually a lot closer to a 21st century model than we are, because they’re able to move more quickly; they don’t carry the same baggage that we do from the 20th century. So I think the most potent challenges are definitely going to continue coming from there.
