Steal this film – an exploration of publishing – a declaration of war.
I am and always have been about publishing.
I never really fitted the artist mold, but I loved the various methods and technologies I encountered whilst learning about media and the creation of various forms of art.
That is why I took to the web so quickly and easily. It was instantly rewarding, accessible and relatively cost-free (more-so now).
For many long years a war has been waged against the common internet user. But you might not know anything about it. Let me help.
Be a Pirate !!!
The internet used to be a place of freedom, expression and ideas – all being exchanged and improved-upon. This was the ideas behind the original Hyper Text Mark-up Language as invented by Tim Berners-Lee – a web where users could add, edit and remove the content of any document they were browsing.
The internet Mr Berners-Lee conceived and built was based upon the first international network of computers (inter-net) called the Arpanet, where information was king – the very idea being that you could readily exchange, copy and swap information freely and easily, anywhere on the network.
As things have progressed, things have obviously changed, a world wide web where everyone has the power to edit is problematic when your not solely involved in a research project with other scientists, thus the web as we know it today with sites and pages we ‘view’ exists. And this is what many know to the be whole truth.
Rarely do we question the authorities that regulate and organise the systems and structures within which with exist. And therein lies the problem.
Simply because something is put on the internet does not make it a crime – we all free to share and distribute any and all information we deem fit. But there are people working for lobby organisations and legal departments that are drawing rings around what is and is not legal in the online world. And this has never happened before, so how do we know what is right and wrong ?
Steal this film
‘Steal this film‘ is an important piece of public-domain media that aims to demystify the culture of Peer-to-peer file sharing and to a lesser extent tells the story fo the famous torrent search engine The Pirate Bay.
The Green Party have also joined the foray of debate by putting this site together to let their policies be known – http://iwouldntsteal.net/
as well as this short video;
There is also a superb documentary piece called Good Copy Bad Copy – that is worth watching.
It is fairly large and long, but highly worth while. See the full-size version on the website here – http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/.
