ConvergeHow will the film industry's business models need to change in a future where piracy is rife and unpreventable? Will royalties and ownership become a thing of the past once every customer has the tools for digital replication? Jamie King, one of the makers of Steal This Film, thinks so - he argues the case for a new approach to copyright with industry leaders including Guy Avshalom, head of legal and business affairs Europe at Lionsgate.
[http://aarkangel.wordpress.com/category/open-content/ critical view on file-sharing]
[https://sheffdocfest.com/films/view/4528 World Premiere in Sheffield]
Second in a series on pirating, this frenetic doc looks at the quickly accelerating landscape for P2P, and the battle to control it. “Just to try to keep on making money by selling this plastic disc with information on it is obviously something which won’t last,” declares one of the many pro-sharing interviews featured. Is the DVD writer really the new “weapon of mass destruction?” Or is it time to accept that the war against copyright has already been lost? Millions of people were encouraged to download Steal This Film I, and did so. In this follow up, the filmmakers examine the roots to the current file sharing wars taking place, and find that copying is as old as communication itself. Given the current state of play, what new opportunities lie ahead for creatives, and what kind of new works will be made when we are able to distribute our ideas to millions at next to no cost? Who stands to lose and who to gain in the massive, historic changes we are facing today?
from [http://www.stealthisfilm.com Steal This Film] webpage:
The first part of STEAL THIS FILM focused mostly on The Pirate Bay, the Piratbyrån and the events around and after the raid that happened at TPB in autumn 2006. Actually, we took a lot more material than this, and asked (for example) a lot of questions about the future of creativity, about how media control works (e.g., how it manages to convince us about the need for constant War, or at least placate us while it's happening) and about whether, and how, the types of organisation we're now working on together can serve us better.
All this material was left out of the final edit of the first part because we were committed to making a 30-ish minute first part.
In part two we want to treat these kinds of issues. We want to talk to the 'thinkers' of the filesharing movement and interview the most interesting of them. We also want to talk to Adam Curtis, who made The Century of the Self, and the Power of Nightmares. We want to talk to Noam Chomsky. We want to talk to Sy Hersh (The New Yorker), John Pilger and Robert Fisk. We'd like to find out what part they think the old media played into getting us in the mess we're in. We'd like to help them think about the future we're building and catch them thinking about it on camera. (How about Lawrence Lessing and his Creative Commons and Free Culture projects. Lawrance Lessing's activities alone are worthy of a documentary. He should certainly not be overlooked)
Also consider getting in touch with the makers of the "Alternative Freedom" documentary at http://www.alternativefreedom.org/ and maybe discuss sharing footage since your aims might be related. Maybe you could try sharing all your rough footage via bittorent so that other peers can offer their own cuts of your film along with footage from other documentaries. There's a tonne of Chomsky footage already available in which he outlines the damage caused by commercial media, lots of which is available on chomsky.info.
We'd like to make sure all our shots are in focus this time, and we're a bit jealous of the sound recording on good documentaries. And the lighting. So we'll get that right next time (see 'things you can help with!').