Open Source Cinema

» see opensourcecinema.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Brett Gaylor was making a documentary about copyright and decided the honest way to do it was to give the documentary away before it was finished. Open Source Cinema started as a public beta around 2004 under the name The Basement Tapes, launched properly at SXSW Interactive in March 2007 on a Drupal install, and was co-produced with EyeSteelFilm and the National Film Board of Canada.

The site did two things. It published Gaylor's raw footage under Creative Commons licenses so anyone could take it, and it put an editor called the Remixer in the browser so you could cut without owning software. You could pull clips from YouTube or Flickr into the same timeline as your own uploads, then post the result back for other people to recut.

Then the loop closed, which is the part that made it more than a fan site. Edits made by strangers on the website were pulled into the finished feature. Hundreds of people contributed, and the film that came out the other end in 2008 was RiP!: A Remix Manifesto, built around the mashup musician Girl Talk and around the argument that copyright had stopped protecting creators and started charging them rent.

Turkey in those years had a simpler relationship with all of this. The mp3s went around the internet cafes in 2002 and 2003 without anybody framing it as a manifesto, and the copyright fight that Gaylor was filming was, from where I was sitting, a debate happening in countries where the enforcement was real. The film reached me long after the website that made it had stopped answering.

~ the dossier ~

~ the remixer ~

Editing video in a browser in 2007 was a genuinely hard thing to ship. Flash was doing the heavy lifting over connections that made a two minute upload feel like a commitment, and the companies attempting it did not survive the decade. Jumpcut was bought by Yahoo and switched off, Eyespot closed outright. Open Source Cinema was not trying to win that market, which is probably why it lasted as long as it did. The Remixer existed to serve one film's argument rather than to become a company.

The site hosted other work along the way. Homeless Nation ran through it, as did a project on the policing of dissent and a second-generation cut of the film's own material labeled RiP 2.0.

~ the film it fed ~

RiP!: A Remix Manifesto did the tour that documentaries did in 2008 and 2009, and it has outlived its host site by nearly two decades. It sits on the Internet Archive today, freely downloadable, which is exactly what the film asked for. Gaylor kept working on the same nerve afterward, making Do Not Track in 2015 about the surveillance economy that grew where the copyright argument used to be.

~ temporarily offline ~

The crawl tells the ending better than any report does. English Wikipedia says the site closed in September 2010, but the archive shows opensourcecinema.org still serving a full site on 26 February 2011, with a Registration Closed banner where the signup used to be. That was the warning.

The next capture, on 10 April 2011, is 501 bytes long. The whole page reads: offline, the site is temporarily offline and will return shortly. It was still saying that a year later in May 2012, still 501 bytes, still promising. The domain has since stopped resolving entirely, so the last thing a website about giving your work away ever published was a promise it did not keep.

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