Movie Responses
Response to Rip!: A Remix Manifesto
There is a reason
why copyright law is such a hot issue today: there just isn’t a simple answer
to what the laws should protect, and what the penalties should be for violating
them. The problem is that in many ways, both sides are at least partially
right.
As a visual
communications designer, my intellectual property is something that will always
be very important to me. I have to think long and hard and work for many hours
before I come to a polished design.
Take this example:
A company comes to me and asks for me to design their logo, one of the most
important part of any company’s visual identity (just think about all the logos
that you undoubtedly have drilled in your brain and how they make you feel,
i.e. Apple, Nike, etc.). Such an important aspect of a business will
undoubtedly take some serious hard work to really create something good. In a
capitalist economy, I should receive adequate remuneration for my hard work.
But let’s say the company that commissioned me doesn’t go with my design, they “would
like to go in a different direction” they say. How appalled do you think I
would be if six months later I saw a logo identical to the one I designed for
them that I had never been paid for because they "rejected" it? That is theft
outright.
In the film,
Disney was shown as a company that heavily pursued infringers of the copyrights
they held on their characters, and even went so far as to (successfully) lobby
Congress to change copyright law to prevent Mickey Mouse from becoming public
domain. I find this ironic because of a case of Disney and Target infringing on
the intellectual property of a design firm named Modern Dog.
Basically, in 2011, Disney ripped off a design that Modern Dog had put in a book they published in 2008 and put it on a t-shirt that was sold at Target. See the pictures below for reference. The first image is a side by side of the two designs, the book and the t-shirt. Notice that all of the copied dogs that appear on the t-shirt have been flipped from the original design, which is by no means a coincidence.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Design/comments/13f80j/modern_dog_gets_ripped_off_by_disney_and_target/
In the end, Modern Dog won a settlement against Disney, which from my perspective is a victory for designers over mega-corporations who like to misappropriate work.
If you'd like to read more on the case, here are some links that you might find interesting:
- Modern Dog, Copyright, and the Burden of Proof
- Modern Dog Design vs. Target vs. Disney
- Modern Dog vs. Target Outcome
Let's now return to our initial hypothetical: imagine if someone took your work and called it their own? What if they received the fame and/or fortune for your hard work, while you were just trying to make ends meet? Copyright is in place to protect people from this happening to them.
That said, there are some artists who are very much okay with making their work free for any use under Creative Commons. They are a noble group of interweb evangelists and dreamers to whom many of us creators owe a great deal. However, while I can't speak for all artists, I can say that I know for myself and for many others, that is simply not sustainable. To provide most of, if any, of my hard work for free or for "donations" is simply something I cannot afford if I want to live a comfortable life. All set aside, it is ultimately the decision of the creator as to how they want to distribute and control the usage of their creation.
However, this does not mean that I am not willing to help other creators. On the contrary, I think there is a better way to give to the community than by just giving out my work. No, in my opinion there is a much better way. To teach. There is an old proverb that my parents told me when I was young: "If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime."
Gaylor's manifesto says that "Culture always builds on the past." This is true, but a culture is not defined by things but rather by ideas, so an even greater statement is that Ideas and Knowledge build on the past. Our knowledge is worth much more than anything we will ever produce. It's what allows us to continually put out work that is better than the work before. In many ways, if we give out our work for free, we are stunting the growth of other creators. If we go on and die without ever teaching the next generation, then there is a very serious risk of our art form being lost.
This film obviously made me think a lot given how much I have written in response. I would most certainly classify Rip!: A Remix Manifesto as propaganda, although no one should be surprised by that given that it proclaims itself as a manifesto in the title. I believe the film would have been more successful as a persuasive device had they presented the opposition's side more objectively. They presented a very one sided argument which is the least effective model for persuasion. I understand their passion over this issue, but overall it had a negative impact on their credibility.
That said, there are some artists who are very much okay with making their work free for any use under Creative Commons. They are a noble group of interweb evangelists and dreamers to whom many of us creators owe a great deal. However, while I can't speak for all artists, I can say that I know for myself and for many others, that is simply not sustainable. To provide most of, if any, of my hard work for free or for "donations" is simply something I cannot afford if I want to live a comfortable life. All set aside, it is ultimately the decision of the creator as to how they want to distribute and control the usage of their creation.
However, this does not mean that I am not willing to help other creators. On the contrary, I think there is a better way to give to the community than by just giving out my work. No, in my opinion there is a much better way. To teach. There is an old proverb that my parents told me when I was young: "If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime."
Gaylor's manifesto says that "Culture always builds on the past." This is true, but a culture is not defined by things but rather by ideas, so an even greater statement is that Ideas and Knowledge build on the past. Our knowledge is worth much more than anything we will ever produce. It's what allows us to continually put out work that is better than the work before. In many ways, if we give out our work for free, we are stunting the growth of other creators. If we go on and die without ever teaching the next generation, then there is a very serious risk of our art form being lost.
This film obviously made me think a lot given how much I have written in response. I would most certainly classify Rip!: A Remix Manifesto as propaganda, although no one should be surprised by that given that it proclaims itself as a manifesto in the title. I believe the film would have been more successful as a persuasive device had they presented the opposition's side more objectively. They presented a very one sided argument which is the least effective model for persuasion. I understand their passion over this issue, but overall it had a negative impact on their credibility.
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