STEAL THIS FILM II screenings and coverage
I’ll use this post as a place to record STEAL THIS FILM II coverage I have noticed. Usually this means it will be a substantial post or a well-known publication.
(I note that many blogs and online publications simply re-iterate all or part of the text from the front page of STEALTHISFILM.COM, and/or Wikipedia, and/or BoingBoing. So it is worth getting a Press Pack up for a project even if it’s going to be mainly for bloggers. We/they appear to be as lazy as mass media journalists most of the time! Maybe if some of the people who are screening the film would write up audience responses that would help. Or maybe we should publish some of the thousands of responses that have been mailed to us… I also think it is not too shabby in this context to think about identifiying people who might like to write about the film and asking them to do so directly: many people are happy to link us, few are happy to put together three paragraphs of original material on us. Is this a hangover from the mass media?)
Via Google Alerts, I read through this blog (thanks, Tomithy) that STEAL THIS FILM II is an official selection in the Singapore International Film Festival. Great news! But what is this with me having to find out via some (obviously discerning) guy’s blog that our film is an a major international film festival? Hello?
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I recently heard (thanks to Rasmus and Ronaldo) that STEAL THIS FILM made the front page of some Brazilian newspapers. I hadn’t really realised that it was so big over there.
From Folha (Folha de S.Paulo is a Portuguese language newspaper published in São Paulo, Brazil. It has the largest circulation in Latin America, with a daily print run of 1,500,000):
“Grupo britânico pró-downloads ilegais lança segunda parte de documentário”
Produced by a group called League of Noble Peers, in reference to the “peer-to-peer” or P2P, exchange of files between users online, the film is a documentary in favour of the most controversial activity to arise from Internet use: downloading movies, music, books and other intellectual property without payment of copyright- - what the MPAA calls “piracy”.
“Many people believe that this change in communication is temporary, that it can be stopped by the entertainment industry preventing the exchange of files, this new way of thinking. We wanted to make a film to close this discussion, which showed that this revolution will not be reversed, ” said Director Jamie King, by telephone.
“Once people understand this, they can begin to think creatively about what will follow. Only when you believe that the old order will stop do you begin to consider what comes after — because you know the future is unwritten. ”
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/ilustrada/ult90u363525.shtml
Forward Escape is a weekly documentary video night at the New College of Florida. Topics include: Consumerism, History, Psychology, Technology, Drugs, Ecology, Marketing, Economics, Politics, and more. They are showing both parts of STEAL THIS FILM on the 4th March 2008.
South By Southwest Film Festival (Global Doc Days)
http://2008.sxsw.com/film/screenings/film/F12039.html. I am very pleased to see that our film has been selected for South By Southwest, the second international film festival at which it has been officially screened. The SxSW programme calls me an ‘anarchist professor’ which I really enjoyed:
Intellectual Property professor and anarchist Jamie King has become a figure-head for the pro-piracy movement. Steal This Film II explains how and why the war against file-sharing has been lost and the huge potential of new avenues of grassroots distribution, peer-to-peer networks and piracy that fly in the face of the old established Hollywood models.
NYU: http://www.mushon.com/spr08/nmrs/02/26/201/#more-201
A student from an NYU class posted a rather snooty ‘review’ which reminds me why I so dislike what the academy has become, partly cribbed from Felix Stalder’s piece on Nettime, partly interested, and partly distinterestedly muttering about the film’s relation to Henry Jenkins (who we tried to interview but wasn’t available.) One thing these students might muse upon, though I don’t imagine them as big musers, is their relationship to our work. Having ‘heard it all before’, they make no mention of the difference in the way our work has reached them, how they consumed it, and their relationship with us. May I sneer at that default New York liberal conservatism? Yawn.
SFC, The Other Cinema
Delighted to see this screening at The Other Cinema in sunny SFC, which we’ll be visiting presently:
OC inaugurates its 24th year with a festive celebration of the Open-Source spirit! Headlining is the West Coast premiere of Jamie King’s half-hr. Steal This Film (2), a spot-on primer on strategies of access and appropriation in today’s Info Age. Initiating the evening is local hero Rick Prelinger, in person, with a provocative performative lecture on motion picture archives.
STF II in the UK’s
New Media Age:
http://www.nma.co.uk/Articles/26562/New+site,+same+invaluable+content.html
STF II now on the syllabus at NYU:
http://www.mushon.com/spr08/nmrs/02/19/brief-concluding-the-2nd-travelogue/
STF II at the UK Green Party National Conference:
http://www.greenparty.org.uk/files/conference/2008/Spring_2008_Timetable.pdf
Steal This Film II: Review
http://mikesheetal.com/en/2008/01/28/review-steal-this-film-ii/
‘Steal This Film Is A Must-See’:
http://newteevee.com/2008/01
STF II on Creative Commons: ‘The League of Noble Peers has done it again’
http://creativecommons.org
STF ‘Most Important Film of 2007′:
http://www.informatik.umu.se
STF II on BoingBoing: ‘The Internet Makes Us All Into Copiers’:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007
‘Steal some popcorn and grab somebody’s chair, because this is going to be fun’
http://www.insideonlinevideo
‘one of those films that should air instead of news’
http://torrenttimes.wordpress
http://www.digital-rights.net/
Inside Online Video, ‘ Steal This Film II’:
Steal This Film (2006) was revolutionary in that it was the first documentary about filesharing not made by some offline media outfit looking to protect its own outdated business model. The sequel, Steal This Film II, goes even further with historical analogies and contemporary examples of how “piracy” is nothing more than a fiction created by whiners losing control of information in the face of technological advances. This film is well-timed, released days before the 25th anniversary of ARPANET’s historic switch to TCP/IP
… The Gutenberg press was initially condemned by commoners as the work of the Devil, and later suppressed by aristocrats as a tool of rebellion. The same thing is happening to online video today — and we all know how big a hit Gutenberg’s thing became. Steal some popcorn and grab somebody’s chair, because this is going to be fun — unless, of course, you work inside offline video.
Paul Glazowski, Mashable, ‘Steal This Film 2: Nets Bigger Donations Than First Attempt’:
TorrentSpy relayed the financial results for the first four days of “Steal This Film 2’s time out on the open market, and how interesting it was to see the average payment being presented by those who downloaded the new production. The magic number? $15.Before I go out on the record here as supporting the pay-what-you-will financial model being employed by more and more music acts and various other businesses, all of which have received a fairly significant boost of attention following Radiohead’s much-publicized distribution of its new album In Rainbows, we should certainly point out the fact that, despite the sizable sum of contributions for “Steal This Movie 2” made recently, the majority of downloaders have indeed avoided tossing so much as a penny into the piggy bank the film’s creators put in place. (The same results can be found for most all efforts stipulated above as well.)Still, one can’t be anything but impressed at how much traction the donation process has in fact garnered in the last several months. Reading Jamie King’s (the producer of “Steal This Movie 2”) response to the returns given by viewers is rather thought provoking. It almost leaves one contemplating the possibility of turning such an open-ended payment system into a viable financial model.
Mike Jones Digital Basin, part of Digital Media Online, Inc., ‘the world’s largest publisher in the digital media market (with over 1 million unique visitors on a monthly basis)’, ‘ Steal this Film‘:
We live in an age where the world’s corporations have told use emphatically that we NEED a ‘digital lifestyle’ and should have it NOW…! And so, like dutiful little lemmings, we went out and did just that - we bought all those machines and devices they insisted that we buy and we hooked them up to the ‘information super highway’ that they said we had to connect to… But now they’re angry at us; they’re very afraid of what we might do with the devices of the digital lifestyle that they told us we had to have.Turns out the devices and machines we bought have only ONE purpose, only ONE function, only ONE true ability - the ability to Copy, the ability to Replicate and the ability to Diseminate. Whether big or small, thats what a computer does. It makes copies, it stores copies and it distributes copies. But now the movie studios and record companies and software developers are all very grumpy at us for using the devices to do exactly what they’re intended to do….?
Images For The Future (a project from the Dutch Film Museum, Institute for Sound and Vision, Centrale Discotheek Rotterdam, National Archives, Association of Public Libraries and Knowledgeland), ‘Recent views in the ongoing copyright vs. open access debate’:
Copyright used to be a very specialized field of law, but over the last few years, it has become a highly political topic, where discussions routinely tend to include issues such as freedom of information, human rights of access to knowledge, democracy etc.. These lively discussions take place in every thinkable media forms.
This premise is the starting point of the documentary Steal This Film II, released a few weeks ago. Through interviews with Yochai Benkler, Brewster Kahle, Rick Prelinger, Laurence Liang and many other influential thinkers, Steal This Film brilliantly explores current changes in the way media is produced, distributed and consumed. It traces back the roots of piracy to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century and continues makes the case how file sharing is the fundamental structure of the internet. For copyright holders, this results in serious headaches. As Aaron Swarts, co-founder of the social news website Reddit.com states: “there’s no one you can go to and say: stop the file sharing – it’s just not built that way” If you haven’t downloaded the documentary yet, you can do so online: at Steal This Film II.
Mark Pesce, Unevenly Distributed: Production Models for the 21st Century. I’m delighted Mark is using STEAL THIS FILM II in his teach materials at Screen Training Ireland — it’s included in his seminar packs. We hope to hear from them, or you, if you were at these sessions!
‘In the age of BitTorrent, piracy is not necessarily a menace. The ability to “hyperdistribute” a programme – using BitTorrent to send a single copy of a programme to millions of people around the world efficiently and instantaneously – creates an environment where the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. This seems counterintuitive, but only in the context of systems of distribution which were part-and-parcel of the scarce exhibition outlets of theaters and broadcasters. Once everyone, everywhere had the capability to “tuning into” a BitTorrent broadcast, the economics of distribution were turned on their heads. The distribution gatekeepers, stripped of their power, whinge about piracy. But, as was the case with recorded music, the audience has simply asserted its control over distribution. This is not about piracy. This is about the audience getting whatever it wants, by any means necessary.’
Zero influence, ‘ Steal This Film Too‘:
a surprisingly good documentary about piracy. It offers some tales and insights into the intrinsic need for sharing/copying in a networked world. Unfortunately, it’s very anti-media industries and thus it falls down on being a balanced understanding on the impact of piracy for the future of production.This approach to debate on how we all use duplication and derivatives in communication prevents a resolution for artists and brands developing a workable relationship; the constant baiting against the entertainment industry alludes to a belief that they are no longer needed, referring to the London Grime scene as an exemplar in production. Grime is a true grass roots movement, but like every home producer knows, you still need professional production values to make the craft shine. There’s a big difference between ‘home recordings’ where you’re ripping a DVD for sharing via bittorrent and ‘home recording’ where you’re making something from existing culture, something with a new construct, architecture, aesthetic or utilitarian purpose.
simpleRECURISION, ‘ What the One-Sided Coin of the Mind can Buy‘:
In Steal this Film, an indignant rabbit salesman (in a cute cartoon metaphor) refuses to lower the price on his rabbits, even though they are multiplying and, so, arguably, becoming a cheaper commodity, due to a high amount of supply. Eventually, the salesman fails to make a sale and a little girl steals one of the rabbits “because there are so many.” Mhumm. If a man sells rabbits at a price no one can agree to, either there is a problem with the rabbits, or there is a problem with the price. As hateful as all things Apple are to me, their post-Napster single-song-purchase model has revolutionised the reproduction of cultural information and people have come in droves to vote for it with their wallets. Suddenly, the price for the rabbits was right, despite a potentially-infinite amount of rabbits available for sale. So what is the problem here? Is the consumer now jealous of the producer for finding an infinite income source? Perhaps. (This would explain why we now often prefer to pay for seeminly-unreal objects with non-existing payment.) Why does not the consumer find his own rabbit to sell? Is the rabbit a commodity the consumer does not need? Why can not the producer then adjust his supply and his price - and go on, uninterrupted? Whether we like it or not, the world is driven by simple and fundamental laws of market economics and human psychology. So what if the market is now no longer local? So what if we can buy and sell bits of data (which also happen to be music) at incredible speeds? Oh, right, we are applying economic theory to that which we have declared to be not real, and herein, as our good friend Hamlet tells us, lies the rub.
