Is Web 2.0 About Exploitation Or Empowerment?

A Remix Weekend: Book And Movie About Remix Culture Released

from the have-fun dept

Fri, Oct 17th 2008 7:42pm — Mike Masnick

We just covered Larry Lessig's recent opinion piece about how to save remix culture (which, tragically, was entitled "a defense of piracy" -- which it's not). However, that was just a teaser from his new book, REMIX, which has now been released. And, of course, true to form, Lessig will soon release a copy of the book online for remixing purposes. And, as Mathew Ingram tells us, today an "open source documentary about copyright and culture" called RiP: A Remix Manifesto is premiering as well. That movie was made, in part, with the help of many people working on making it better. Here's the trailer:

The movie apparently focuses on Gregg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, the remix artist we've discussed in the past plenty of times. It certainly looks like the book and the documentary will go together well (Lessig appears in the film), and hopefully will get people realizing that creativity has always involved standing on the shoulders of giants, and being able to improve on the works of those who came before you -- and with draconian copyright laws, we're often stamping out that possibility.

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Filed Under: larry lessig, remix

7 Comments

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Bill, 17 Oct 2008 @ 10:09pm

Censorship??
Who decides which books get press (Remix) and which books gets censored (America Deceived)? After all, censorship is becoming America's favorite past-time. The US gov't (and their corporate friends), already place protesters in fenced-in cages, ban books like "America Deceived" from Wikipedia, Amazon and Facebook, and shut down Ron Paul. Free Speech forever.
Last link (before Google Books caves to pressure and drops the title):
America Deceived (book)
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- William, 19 Oct 2008 @ 12:03pm
  
  Re: Censorship??
  So I went to go search for the book you are talking about. And first thing I checked was Amazon and found the book easily. So what's this about the book being banned?
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SteveD, 18 Oct 2008 @ 2:11am

Matt Mason
On a similar topic Matt Mason (author of the Pirates Dilemma) is supposed to be working on a full TV series around this.
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ac, 18 Oct 2008 @ 11:51am

re: "a defense of piracy" - Just wanted to note, Lessig didn't get to pick the title of the article.

ac
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Lucretious, 19 Oct 2008 @ 5:26am

great trailer. when is it supposed to be released?
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Anonymous Coward, 19 Oct 2008 @ 10:01am

I believe it is absolutely terrible and an affront to our society that copyright law requires people to come up with creative works using their own original material. They should be free to use whatever they darn well please.
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zcat, 19 Oct 2008 @ 6:43pm

Original work only..
Except that would have totally killed Disney. Practically every Disney film is based on someone else's story, and as often as not before that story was even out of copyright. Right from the historic 'Steamboat Willie' which was a parody of Steamboat Bill Jr made the same year, truly original stories from Disney are few and far-between.
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