Although most of the film was focused on Girl Talk and his music, the oft-cited "Remixer's Manifesto" made it clear that much larger issues are at stake:
- Culture always builds on the past
- The past always tries to control the future
- Our future is becoming less free
- To build free societies you must limit control of the past
These themes are very interesting and important, and work to illustrate the threat posed by legal restrictions on sharing ideas. I believe that any sort of progress, whether it be musical, social or scientific, is fostered by the free exchange of ideas, and allowing large corporations to have such restrictive power over ideas will benefit nothing but shareholder's pockets.
It seems to me that the recording industry is perverting copyright laws to serve their own selfish ways. I believe that copyright laws should function to protect ownership on ideas, to establish origin, so that someone else cannot claim that they came up with your idea. It's not like Girl Talk is simply making a mixtape of his favorite songs and claiming he wrote and sang them all. His compositions of wildly varied samples are new works that are much more than simply the sum of their parts. And unless you are somehow materializing objects with your mind, any creative process is simply taking things that already exist and putting them together in novel ways.
It is almost too perfect that Girl Talk's alter-ego is Gregg Gillis, mild-mannered biomedical engineer, because it allowed the film maker a nice transition into some of the deeper implications of allowing authoritative control over ideas. Because all progress is simply a reaction to the present conditions, how can there be progress if it is illegal to alter present ideas? This is especially significant in a field like biomedical engineering, as life-saving advances may be being impeded.
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