The second installment of Steal This Film has just been released for download (available in 4 different resolutions here: http://www.stealthisfilm.com/Part2/) It is the successor of the widely popular (more than 4 million downloads) documentary about the 2006 raid on the pirate bay (if you have not seen part one, it is available here: http://www.stealthisfilm.com/Part1/). Steal this film part 2 attempts to insert the conflicts over file-sharing and distributed communication in a historical context.Beginning with the book and the printing press, STF 2 tells of the disruptive consequences of new technologies of reproduction, and how these inventions are resisted by those in power. Download, watch, enjoy and distribute... (...and if you feel like it donate to the makers: http://stealthisfilm.com/Part2/support.php) (Thanks, Paul)
Mini-review at Boing Boing. If I find the time I will get back with my own review soon.
I decided to format Good Copy Bad Copy (descriptive mini-reviews here and here) for iPhone and Ipod touch. Many will be getting one for Xmas, so figured this would be a good way to get some more impatient-ADD-21st century people to watch our documentary.
If you like it and appreciate our work - please donate a few bucksPS2: If you want to help us by hosting this file (or other version - we have a bunch on subtitled versions ready for release), please get in touch. Let´s hope I don't get in trouble with one.com for this one - after all, we are allowed to share it ;)
I have been checking in periodically on the Open Souce Cinema project for a while. With some skepticism, i must admit, because however good the idea may be, I know how time consuming opening up can be even with even the simplest projects. Sharing large video files, building a community around your content, and constantly remixing is just .. tedious - not least if you are busy with other projects, don't have enough money to work on the same project for several years (or rich donors/patrons etc). If I remember right, this team actually hired a brasilain film crew scattershooting away, at the iCommons iSummit in Rio back in ´06. Obviously, we would have spent our whole budget before getting started with a similar approach!
Anyway - there are some interesting, bold statements in the manifesto, such as
3) Film is Fascism!
The traditional approach to creating films, especially documentary films, is flawed. A single perspective cannot hope to capture the nuance of an evolving cultural debate. Sure, Point of View is important. But "The Ecstasy of Influence", the participatory nature of digital creativity, begs us to create media that invites input from its audience.
and some really interesting battles with the romantic genius idea that still roams in the film world - one man, one vision, etc.
But when it comes to this project - up until now I haven't really seen anything that impressed me - and since this project was long underway when we started working on Good Copy Bad Copy, I thought to myself this may just fork and fork into oblivion while parts of the subject matter became obsolete. Digital reveries that would never end up solid and .. err .. viewable.
But now, take this live recording of Girltalk:
and have a look at this remix (give it 15 seconds to get started),
"created by all the students in COMS274 Intermedia I, Dept of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Fall 2007. Working in Flash, all 64 students rotoscoped 1-3 seconds of video each, over a period of three weeks. (Most of them had never used Flash before.)
We were inspired by Bob Sabiston's digital rotoscoping (as seen in Snack and Drink, Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly), and our readings and class discussions about copyright and creativity."
I will be checking back more often and hope the best for this project. I have been doing a series of interviews on danish radio on DYI filmmaking and collaborative filmmaking, and this could be next stop :)
Der har været megen snak om etiske julegaver på det sidste, og det er selvfølgelig storartet - men jeg har besluttet at donere til Wikipedia, fordi der i langtidsperspektivt kun er en vej frem for den såkaldte trejde verden: adgang til og mulighed for at tilegne sig viden. Wikipedia og Wikimedia foundation er en af den slags projekter, og desuden et værktøj jeg benytter flere gange dagligt (og iøvrigt bidrager til, desværre for sjældent).
iCommons, the organisation that rolls out Creative Commons licenses worldwide, is auctioning off "paraphernalia from some of the world’s leading Internet figures". We donated our last remaining bottle of FREE BEER 1.0. Go get it!
FREE BEER is free in the truest sense of the word: it was created by applying modern free software/open source methods to a traditional real-world product: beer. Brewed to a Creative Commons licensed recipe by students at the Copenhagen IT University and artist collective Superflex, this is the last bottle of the first batch of version 1.0 Free Beer. In the words of the Brazilian Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil: “It’s not just free beer, it’s good beer!”More items here
Radiohead left EMI because Terra Firma CEO Guy Hands "doesn't understand the music industry", according to an interview with the band to be printed next week.
Talking to the Observer Music Monthly, Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien says that the band were keen to do a deal with the major, however negotiations broke down because Hands "didn't know what to offer us".
"EMI is in a state of flux," says O'Brien. "It's been taken over by somebody who's never owned a record company before, Guy Hands and Terra Firma, and they don't realise what they're dealing with.
(..)
Radiohead ended their relationship with EMI in October, when the band signed a deal to release physical copies of seventh album In Rainbows through indie label XL in the UK.
As you'll see in this video, there has been important progress in making Wikipedia compatible with the world of Creative Commons licensed work. But we should be very precise about this extremely good news: As Jimmy announces, the Wikimedia Foundation Board has agreed with a proposal made by the Free Software Foundation that will permit Wikipedia (and other such wikis) to relicense under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.That is very different from saying that Wikipedia has relicensed under a CC license. The decision whether to take advantage of this freedom granted by the FSF when the FSF grants it will be a decision the Wikipedia community will have to make. We are very hopeful that the community will ratify this move to compatible freedoms. And if they do, we are looking forward to an extraordinary celebration.
"So what does this mean for Wikipedia? A lot of people will now be able to legally mix Wikipedia and Creative Commons content. This announcement marks the end of a lack of interoperability of the licenses that was making the content less “free” for the users.
Contrary to the old title of this post (..) Wikipedia is not switching to CC. It actually made a deal allowing the community to relicense the content of the wikis under a BY-SA license. So it’s now up to the Wikipedians to choose whether they do or not.
Anyway, Creative Commons will definitely have more weight and credibilty tomorrow than it had this morning. 4 out of the 10 biggest websites in the world now integrate Creative Commons"
I am a digital activist, media professional and advisor. Since the early days of the free culture movement, I have been working on various access to knowledge and copyright-reform project, such as FREE BEER, Good Copy Bad Copy and Creative Commons.
STEAL THIS FILM 2 OUT 
