My article on the affect copyright issues are having on documentary filmmakers—stifling creativity and discussion of critical issues in the process—is in the current issue of Maisonneuve (“Copyfight”).

For more material on the subject, check out the work of Brett Gaylor at opensourcecinema.org, one of the filmmakers I interviewed for the article. His latest project, The Basement Tapes, addresses copyright and remix culture issues in the music sphere (watch the trailer). While Gaylor focuses on mash-up artists and music downloading, he ties it into the larger movement in favour of open source culture (interviewing the likes of Lawrence Lessig).

Gaylor told me he was partly inspired to make Basement Tapes by the Hurricane Katrina home videos that people posted on YouTube in the storm’s aftermath. The vids typically combined “stolen” tv footage and self-shot stuff with pop music tracks. For that reason they’re technically all illegal. But they provided an important, independent document of what happened in New Orleans.

Gaylor says he was also inspired by the Philadelphia-based mash-up artist Girl Talk, whose stuff is as my Québec friends might say, “superfantastic!” Here’s a wee sample…

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Forget the red state/blue state, conservative/liberal, religious/secular culture wars we’ve heard so much about for the past twenty years. While that conflagration isn’t going to disappear anytime soon—it will warp into new directions, however—the battle royale over ownership and access to our collective culture is only going to get louder and nastier. Copyright as it exists now is incompatible with many cultural and technological developments. Consider the advances in file compression, sharing and manipulation and the popularity of collage/pastiche as an art form for social critique and parody. When photo-archive magnate Mark Getty (of Getty Images) says “intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century”, one sees the unintended prophecy contained therein: that we will fight over intellectual property just like we have historically fought over oil.

In recent years there have been many examples of the rearguard action that corporations are fighting: the concentration of ownership of archives and stock houses; the willingness to sue teenagers and grandmothers over a handful of illegal downloads; the disappearance of more materials from the public domain; and the ludicrous clearance fees demanded of independent creators. They can all be interpreted as expressions of a dying business model.

Two last notes. 1) If you missed last month’s Vanity Fair there was an excellent article on Pirate Bay (“Pirates of the Multiplex”), the Swedish file-sharing site that’s teaching Hollywood a lesson in 21st century economics and human nature. 2) And did you know that last year the Boy Scouts began offering activity badges for respecting copyright?