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Seen: Good Copy Bad Copy

03.18.08 @ 12:03AM Tags : copyright, creativecommons, girltalk, goodcopybadcopy, seen

A year ago I wrote, “in an effort to post more regularly, without having to increase my output of original material, I’m going to start embedding interesting short films or other video content from the far corners of the interweb, most of which (I hope) you will not have seen before.”

I went back to check because I was curious as to how many Seen posts I’d made over the past year; the sad answer is a trifling three.

So here is the Danish documentary Good Copy Bad Copy, which was released gratis last year on the internet. Fitting, considering its subject: copyright, specifically laws pertaining to attribution and payment, both in music and film. The doc, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Chistensen, and Henrik Moltke, moves briskly from music sampling techniques in American hip-hop, to baile funk remixes in Brazil, to movie pirating in Nigeria, to file sharing in Sweden (and plenty more). It features interviews with Girl Talk and Danger Mouse, music by RJD2 and Santogold, and is globetrotting, informative, and entertaining. It’s also an hour long, so I’d recommend clicking the full screen button and kicking back.