Gregg Gillis, the mashup musician who performs as Girl Talk, splices thousands of song samples into single tracks without licensing a single one, and this film follows him on tour while building an argument around him about what copyright law now forbids. Director Brett Gaylor cuts between Gillis's shows, Brazil's Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil pushing Creative Commons licensing into government policy, and Disney's own history of lifting fairy tales and folk stories from the public domain to build an empire that now aggressively defends its copyrights. Law professor Lawrence Lessig appears throughout, laying out how copyright terms have stretched far beyond their original limits and what that does to anyone trying to build on existing culture rather than starting from nothing. The film mixes animation, archival clips, and concert footage to make its case that remixing is not theft but how culture has always worked, from jazz to hip-hop to internet mashups, and that current law criminalizes a practice creators have never actually stopped doing.