I’m currently in the process of writing an article about remix culture and the notion of the Commons. It is taking me in all sorts of fascinating directions, from Girl Talk to Brett Gaylor’s open source film about the musician, RIP: A Remix Manifesto. From Creative Commons to Brad Lichtenstein’s work in progress What We Got: DJ Spooky’s Quest for the Commons. I like this animated video by Laura Hanna and Gavin Browning that examines the notion of the Commons and specifically addresses the question of who owns water.

It has been so frustrating not having time to blog about all the films and other events I attended at HotDocs and then Tribeca. Work has foiled me every time. It has just been a nutty couple of weeks – full of good things but no time to sit and think and write. Yesterday I got home and was so tired that I watched the end of Music and Lyrics and then the end of Just My Luck before crashing out at 9.30pm. Not one of my better TV-watching moments!

I attended a really interesting panel last week at Tribeca called Reuse Remix Renew – covering copyright and digital culture in advance of the release of the Tribeca Institute’s Sample This! licensing toolkit for filmmakers which should be available later this Summer. The panel included DJ Spooky – aka Paul D. Miller, That Subliminal Kid, who has recently released a book he has edited called Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. He said that his 1996 album Songs of a Dead Dreamer would probably not be released today because litigation against sampling has become so much more robust. Spooky thinks of this work as an “invisible sculpture made of fragments of history” and the battles over copyright come down to “who owns memory?” for him. He talked about how the old model of copyright is based on scarcity but now culture is “ubiquitous, downloadable, everywhere, all the time” and smart folk, like Google, are tapping into this new model and making millions. He went on to talk about the bootleg economy that is dominant in many countries in the world and to note that the way that the law is currently written and the way that we actually live are parting ways. We are moving toward a gift economy and people are having to work out how to monetize this in new ways. Digital literacy will be a big deal as we move forward in this new world.

Eric Steuer, creative director of Creative Commons, is one of the people working to increase digital literacy and explore new ways of allowing legal reuse, remixing and sharing of creative work. “People are going to engage with things they love,” he said “so you have to create business models that accept this and work around it. People are not going to stop downloading but they respect the flexibility of Creative Commons.”

Jennifer Urban and Himanshu Singh from the USC Intellectual and Technology Law Clinic are working with the Tribeca Film Insitute to develop the Sample This! toolkit. Clinics like theirs help filmmakers with issues over fair use and the toolkit came out of this work.

Himanshu Singh, Eric Steur, Paul D. Miller, Jennifer Urban and moderator Georg Szalai from The Hollywood Reporter.

While I was thinking about fair use, sampling and copyright I re-discovered this awesome performance by Jamie Lidell so I’m embedding it here for some extra sample-tastic pleasure.

International copyright is such a tricky issue. On the one hand I understand that artists and businesses need to make money in order to survive personally and commercially, but it is also clear that the winds of change are blowing and, as one man says in Steal This Film, “When the winds of change are blowing, some people build shelters while others build windmills.” People thought that the VCR was going to destroy the film industry but it didn’t. What will happen now with the Internet, downloads, file-sharing and peer to peer networks? Some of the windmill builders are the people behind The Pirate Bay, a huge bittorent tracker and the subject of the first part of Steal This Film. I’d love to know what others think about this issue because I have to admit I feel really out of my depth.

Watch the first part of Steal This Film and post your comments.

Some useful resources for those willing to wade into these shark infested waters are the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, the brainchild of Lawrence Lessig, the Center for Social Media, the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US and The Open Rights Group in the UK, and Cory Doctorow (co-editor of Boing Boing) who is particularly eloquent on the problems with DRM. And of course Creative Commons - allowing content creators to decide which rights are reserved.

UPDATE: Check out the Steal This Film podcast from BRITDOC 07 here.