Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor's feature documentary RIP: A Remix Manifesto explores the concept of copyright in the era of Napster, Bit Torrent and peer-to-peer file sharing. Although pop culture giants such as Muddy Waters and the Rolling Stones were able to build on past music to produce their own, the door is now closing behind them. RIP's central protagonist is Gregg Gillis, the Pittsburgh biomedical engineer who moonlights as Girl Talk, a mash-up artist rearranging the pop charts' DNA with his incongruous, entirely sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Digital technology opens up an unprecedented global economy of ideas. RIP explores the robber barons and revolutionaries squaring off across this new frontier as the film journeys from the control rooms of Washington to the favelas of Brazil. Along the way, Gaylor interviews key figures about the complexities of intellectual property in the digital era, among them Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, culture critic Cory Doctorow, Brazilian musician and former Minister of Cultural Affairs Gilberto Gil, and Jammie Thomas, the single mom successfully sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for illegal downloading.