Web activist Brett Gaylor investigates copyright in the information age, tearing apart the twentieth-century media landscape and dissolving the wall between consumers and producers. The protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician who tops the charts with songs built from samples. But is Girl Talk a model of empowerment or the Pied Piper of piracy? RIP looks into the practices of the ‘robber barons’ and of the revolutionaries settling scores on the other side of this new frontier, as the film travels from Washington to the favelas of Brazil. Along the way Gaylor interviews key figures on the complexity of intellectual property in the digital age, among them Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig. RIP is the world’s first open-source documentary, a challenge to the limits of fair use. As a participatory media experiment, from day one Brett shares his material at Opensourcecinema.org so that anyone can make new remixes of it.
