Sunday, 29 September 2013

Media Analysis Assignment - RIP! A Remix Manifesto


Bret Gaylor, the author of “RIP! A Remix Manifesto”, believes that copyright laws are messing with creativity and that they are making the future become less free and that copyright law were initially created to force people to have creativity not to prevent it. The author also believes that the line between inspiration and infringement is often blurred. He created the movie because he felt strongly that other artists should be able to create their own music with other musician’s “samples” or “clips” from their own songs. In my opinion, I believe the film showed bias. I believed it showed bias because in the film it didn’t show the other side of the story. The film only featured people that believe that copyright laws shouldn’t restrain people from using other artist’s music for inspiration. Another bias that is shown in the film is that the author’s favourite type of music is the type of music he is protesting for and presenting in the film.

The filmmaker uses appeal to authority because he uses people that are experts or at least knowledgeable on the topic, therefore making his opinion on mash-up music more believable. Lawrence Lessig, Greg Gillis aka “Girl Talk”, Cory Doctorow, Mark Holser, and Dan O'Neill basically all believe the same thing. They are all in favor of reducing and reforming legal restrictions on copyright laws. Another devise that proves bias was shown in the film was allusion. Gaylor believes that most of the music that is created today is inspired from the music from the past. One of the points he had is that The Rolling Stones have perhaps, without knowledge or intention, borrowed from old blues songs. Gaylor also says that they've gotten around lawsuits and they've also been able to sell the songs to companies for commercials and they didn't have to pay copyright royalties to the people that own the copyrights to the songs.

To be honest, I have never been a fan of remix music and I got kind of bored during the movie. Though, when it started talking about and playing music by the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin I got a little more interested. I was surprised that The Rolling Stones have borrowed from other artists. I haven’t really noticed before that artists borrow and get so much inspiration from other artists. I believe that copyright laws are starting to become more unreasonable than they already are. I think paying thousands of dollars just to have a song featured in something such as a commercial is insane. I also believe that people getting sued and having to go to court and having to pay insane amounts of money just because they downloaded a song from the internet is the most unreasonable thing. If you could just pay 99 cents for a song on iTunes or $5 for a CD at Walmart why are people getting sued for thousands and thousands of dollars just because they downloaded a song of the Internet? Though I agree with most of what the people that were interviewed I don’t agree with some parts of what they had to say or what they did. One of the things I don’t agree with is that “Girl Talk” just takes artists music and makes his own without asking for permission or anything. One of the things I related this to was when I was info tech and I had to create my own website. I had to email the sites I gotten my info from and ask for permission to use it and put it on my website. I agree it’s a difficult process asking for permission, though it felt like it was the right thing to do. I’d probably feel like I was stealing if I hadn't of asked.  Another thing I believe is if they use a song in one of their mashups they should pay an amount of money to the people that have the copyrights for the song of money they receive from the song they made. I don’t believe it should be thousands of dollars but I believe it should be enough. To summarize my argument, I think that most parts of copyright laws are insane and unreasonable but some parts are reasonable. 

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