- ARCHIVE / Post, Pirate
- ‘Steal this Film blazes trails in open distribution and raw footage sharing.’
[from our friends at
Miro. Thanks Holmes!]
Not many shoestring-budget documentary films get seen by
4.86 million people.
It helps that
“Steal this Film” covers the war between Hollywood and a prevailing mode of online video distribution, and that the film’s logo stood in for
the pirate ship on the front page of the world’s favorite torrent […] - ACTA Could Be “Binding” By End of 2008
U.S. Report Says ACTA Deal Gaining Steam
… a report out of the U.S. suggests that there is considerable reason for public concern regarding ACTA.
Congress Daily (sub req) quotes a high-level official from the USTR as indicating that the talks are gaining steam, with a binding international agreement likely by the end of the year. […] - ACTA Links To Go
1.
WARNING! Potential Anti-Counterfeiting Agreement Put Everyone’s Privacy at Risk (Trade Lawyers’ Blog)
“We should all be concerned that some governments will increase laptop searches under the disguised authority of ACTA and in reality to obtain personal information.”
2.
International copyright talks seek BitTorrent-killer laws (The Register)
“At time of writing the EU had not responded to a […] - Terror’s Advocate
Subjects don’t come much more slippery than Jacques Vergès, the half-French, half-Vietnamese lawyer who first came to attention working for the FLN in Algeria’s war of independence and later defended such controversial figures as Klaus Barbie and Slobodan Milosevic. It’s hard to gauge exactly what Schroeder thinks of Vergès, who registers in new interviews as […]
- The ‘Mysterious Supernote’
[’Mysterious Supernote’ is a chapter from Klaus W. Bender,
Moneymakers: The Secret World of Banknote Printing. I think you won’t find it anywhere else on the Web in plain text, or even as a PDF, but if you do, please let me know.]
Over the years the “almighty greenback” has been far and way the most […] - Counterfeit Money
A very short story by Baudelaire.
As we were walking away from a tobacconist’s, my friend carefully sorted out his change: into his left vest pocket he slipped the small gold coins, into his right vest pocket the small silver coins; into the left pocket of his pants, a handful of large copper coins, and […] - Paranoid Park
Paranoid Park is adapted, with reasonable fidelity, from Blake Nelson’s young-adult novel. But in telling the tale of a Portland skater kid involved in the accidental death of a railroad bull, Van Sant comes close to inventing his own film language. The chronology is shuffled and the narrative dealt out as a succession of subjective […]
- Flandres
From the IMDB: ‘It’s remarkable that this film is not more popular. It successfully strips away the veneer of “civilisation” (false morality, good manners etc) and shows people as selfish, brutal animals, and depicts modern, asymmetrical warfare as a terrible nightmare where a group of brutish white thugs rape and murder a terrified, technologically backward […]
- Boarding Gate
An interesting (better) film from the maker of Demonlover. Highlights are a brooding performance from Asia Argento and some nice handheld camera. This from the NYT:
read more
- Summer Palace
Beautiful Yu Hong leaves her village, her family and her fiancé to study in Peking. She discovers a world of intense sexual awakening and foolishly falls in love with another student, Zhou Wei. Their relationship turns into a dangerous game reflecting the politically unstable country they live in.
‘In Summer Palace Lou nonetheless succeeds in […]