Filmmaker Brett Gaylor’s favourite “artist” is Girl Talk. Girl Talk doesn’t play an instrument and he doesn’t sing or rap. He takes other people’s art, manipulates it with his computer, mixes it with a bunch of other people’s work and creates a mash-up.

Gaylor knows that what Girl Talk does is illegal, but since he likes the music, he’s made a documentary about why what his friend does should be OK. Regardless of what is stated by the law or conventional wisdom about how copyrights provide artists with the financial support they require to continue to create.

What this film does more than anything else is prove that documentaries have completely abandoned the notion of objectivity.

Gaylor’s film is so one-sided and didactic that about midway through the movie I began hoping that he would be sued into oblivion over his flagrant copyright infringement just so that I will never have to see another one of his films.

The movie spends most of its time attempting to prove that sampling or pirating someone else’s work without their permission should be legal and that it only is illegal because of corporate greed. Gaylor’s main argument is that all art is influenced by the past and that these new remixers are simply taking influence to the next level by sampling without giving the artists any royalties for their work. His other argument is that Paris Hilton likes it, so it must be “hot.”

His most egregious crime is that he never once gets the opinion of those who originally created the work; although he does spend a lot of time telling us what he thinks they should think.

He argues that it’s the large corporations that are causing the restrictions and makes it sound as though the artists love piracy as much as he does. This sort of dubious argument holds absolutely no meaning since the film only features a lot of remixers justifying what they do and why they shouldn’t be sued; never does an artist, whose intellectual property is the real subject of debate, weigh in on how they feel.

Although I hoped for some balance, I can’t say I’m surprised. After all, in a film where the phrase “intellectual property” is tantamount to a four-letter word, one cannot imagine that a term like “journalistic integrity” holds much sway either.

Published in Volume 63, Number 23 of The Uniter (March 12, 2009)