This article is written to promote discussion about copyright, its infringment, its escape routes and about the freedom to learn and to evolve. Copyright law says that a work can’t be used for 70 years after its author’s death: this is a lifetime, even when you are a student and the author is just dead.

Marco Infussi

These are strange times indeed. While they continue to command so much attention in the mainstream media, the ‘battles’ between old and new modes of distribution, between the pirate and the institution of copyright, seem to many of us already lost and won. We know who the winners are. Why then say anymore?

Because waves of repression continue to come: lawsuits are still levied against innocent people; arrests are still made on flimsy pretexts, in order to terrify and confuse; harsh laws are still enacted against filesharing, taking their place in the gradual erosion of our privacy and the bolstering of the surveillance state. All of this is intended to destroy or delay inexorable changes in what it means to create and exchange our creations. If Steal this Film II proves at all useful in bringing new people into the leagues of those now prepared to think ‘after intellectual property’, think creatively about the future of distribution, production and creativity, we have achieved our main goal.

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Steal This Film is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property. Part One, shot in Sweden and released in August 2006 only via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol, combines accounts from prominent players in the Swedish piracy culture (The Pirate Bay, Piratbyrån, and the Pirate Party) with found material, propaganda-like slogans and Vox Pops. The Guardian Newspaper called it ‘at heart a traditionally-structured “talking heads” documentary’ with ‘amusing stylings’ from film-makers who ‘practice what they preach.’. BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow called it ‘an amazing, funny, enraging and inspiring documentary series’. Screened at the British Film Institute and numerous independent international events, it was a talking point in 2007’s British Documentary Film Festival.

Part One

Part One includes a critical analysis of an alleged regulatory capture attempt performed by the Hollywood film lobby to leverage economic sanctions by the United States government on Sweden through the WTO. Alleged aims included the application of pressure to Swedish police into conducting a search and seizure against Swedish law for the purpose of disrupting The Pirate Bay’s BitTorrent tracker.

The film includes interviews with Pirate Bay members Fredrik (tiamo), Gottfrid (Anakata) and Peter Sunde (brokep) that were later used in the documentary film Good Copy Bad Copy, as well as with Piratbyrån members Rasmus Fleisher (RSMS), Johan (Krignell), and Sara (Fraux), and many Swedish citizens.

Found material in Steal This Film includes the music of Can, tracks “Thief” and “She Brings the Rain”; clips from other documentary interviews with industry and governmental officials; several industry anti-piracy promotionals; logos from several major Hollywood studios, and sequences from The Day After Tomorrow, The Matrix, Zabriskie Point, and They Live. The use of these short clips is believed to constitute fair use.

Part Two

Part Two (sometimes subtitled ‘The Dissolving Fortress’) was produced during 2007. It premiered (in a preliminary version) at a conference in Berlin, Germany in November. A cam version leaked soon after. It was officially released on file sharing networks on December 28, 2007 and, according to the filmmakers, downloaded 150,000 times in the first three days of distribution.

Thematically, Part Two examines the technological and cultural aspects of the copyright wars, and the implications of the internet for copying. It includes an exploration of Mark Getty’s infamous statement that “Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century’. It was selected for the Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival and is forthcoming at a number of other film festivals worldwide.

Financing

As well as funding from BritDoc, the Steal This Film series continues to utilise a loose version of the Street Performer Protocol, collecting voluntary donations via a PayPal account, from the www.stealthisfilm.com website. The filmmakers report that roughly one in a thousand viewers are donating, mostly in the range USD 15-40.

Production

Steal This Film 1 and 2 are credited as ‘conceived, directed, and produced’ by The League of Noble Peers. Where Part One contains no personal attribution (possibly due to potential issues with copyright infringement) Part 2 has full credits. The League of Noble Peers report they are working on their next project.

All the articles are in an early developmente phase.
Please be patient: we have to track bugs first!
About this story: we are waiting for an interview with Broke-p.

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