International copyright is such a tricky issue. On the one hand I understand that artists and businesses need to make money in order to survive personally and commercially, but it is also clear that the winds of change are blowing and, as one man says in Steal This Film, “When the winds of change are blowing, some people build shelters while others build windmills.” People thought that the VCR was going to destroy the film industry but it didn’t. What will happen now with the Internet, downloads, file-sharing and peer to peer networks? Some of the windmill builders are the people behind The Pirate Bay, a huge bittorent tracker and the subject of the first part of Steal This Film. I’d love to know what others think about this issue because I have to admit I feel really out of my depth.

Watch the first part of Steal This Film and post your comments.

Some useful resources for those willing to wade into these shark infested waters are the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, the brainchild of Lawrence Lessig, the Center for Social Media, the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US and The Open Rights Group in the UK, and Cory Doctorow (co-editor of Boing Boing) who is particularly eloquent on the problems with DRM. And of course Creative Commons - allowing content creators to decide which rights are reserved.

UPDATE: Check out the Steal This Film podcast from BRITDOC 07 here.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Advocacy, Distribution, Documentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.