Remix Culture

Rip Remix is a movie based on the grey area of copyright and intellectual property law.

It focuses primarily on collaboration of works to form a new one. The movie was a 6 year project for director Brett Gaylor in which he created "the worlds first open source documentary".

The documentary is a heavy promoter of the copyleft regime by actively encouraging people to create open source mash-ups. Rip Remix Manifesto is an open source movie which means anyone can use it, change it or use as a basis for there own works.

Girl Talk is the stage name for musician Gregg Micheal Gillis a mash-up and digital sampling genius. His only instruments is a laptop. He experiments with music and combining them to create a completely new song . . . which isn't so new because its already released music that people know its just compiled in a different way. He takes samples from some well known songs and changes them to morph with others which can create a whole different vibe to the original.

Mickey Mouse vs The Design World

In 1998, American Congress agreed to grant another 20 years of copyright protection to every film, book and song in the land meaning that anything that looks like, similar or is the evolution of anything that is copyrighted is then a clear violation of copyright law because you or the person who copied it does not have the rights because the subject they have copied does not belong to them. This beating black and blue of creativity means that you may create the most beautiful drawing of our well known friend Mickey Mouse and your looking to be sued because hes not your mouse. For example . . .

Mickey Mouse's is formed out of shapes, most famously three circles. Three circles are not illegal, but when arranged as they are in my example they are because they "represent a likeliness" to Mickey Mouse . . . .

The drawing I have done on the right does not represent Mickey Mouse in anyway, there is the mouse in the picture BUT because of the "ears" each character in my drawing has it is deemed a violation of copyright law.

This is completely my own design and drawn at random to illustrate a point yet even though its my design and my idea but uses a concept (shape of the ears) to inform it, it is then illegal.

Remix Culture

Remix culture happens most frequently in the music culture much like that of Girl Talk. YouTube is the most frequent used to share these new remixes. A positive element of YouTube is anyone can have a YouTube account and upload there remixes BUT this freedom isn't so free when you inquire further into the small print. YouTube wipe the arse's of the major record companies by ensuring that media that is uploaded complies with copyright legislation. Observe to the left on one of the remixes I was listening to, a disclaimer from the re-mixer saying they "they don't own anything" making sure even there own remix that they spent time on belongs to the big corporations.

Cyril Hahn

Cyril Hahn is the name of what I perceive to be the current Girl Talk. Much like Gregg Micheal he is a computer musician.

The Canadian born musician is a new wave of sexy in the music industry. Interview magazine even hailed him and his music as "something entirely new and undeniably sexy" while Hahn himself has said: "My friends always describe my music as sex music or make-out music so I guess if you wanna get down to business my songs are just what you need."

Hahn lets you freely download and stream his music from his soundcloud.