Good Copy Bad Copy
Copyright law was built for a world of physical copies, and digital file-sharing broke it almost overnight. Danish directors Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke travel to four continents to show what that break looks like on the ground. In Brazil, they film the tecnobrega scene in Belem, where producers sell CDs cheap and make their money from parties, treating free copying as advertising rather than theft. In Nigeria, they show a home-video film industry built almost entirely around bootleg distribution networks, since no other system could get movies to audiences that fast. American mashup artist Girl Talk demonstrates how his music is stitched together from hundreds of uncleared samples, and lawyer Lawrence Lessig makes the case for looser copyright as a matter of legal philosophy, not just convenience. The RIAA's lawsuits against individual file-sharers appear as the establishment's answer to all of this. No single side wins the argument here; the film lays out working alternatives against the old model and lets the contradictions sit unresolved.