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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