Steal this movie!
The movie ‘Steal This Film‘ offers an interesting view into the world of file sharing. The documentary shows a rarely depicted perspective from file sharers or so-called ‘pirates’, and focuses on the world’s most famous and notorious Bittorrent tracker ‘The Pirate Bay’ and the movement around it.
‘Steal This Film’ is interesting for two reasons: first it shows an insight into the ideas and thoughts of file sharers, from a variety of different backgrounds; from the average kid on the street to the people behind ‘The Pirate Bay’ and closely related initiatives. Secondly, the documentary was made on a shoestring budget (Openbusiness has written more about this here) and was created by people who felt that ‘old media’ was not doing justice to their views on file sharing, or as they state on their site:
“There have been a few documentaries by ‘old media’ crews who don’t understand the net and see peer-to-peer organisation as a threat to their livelihoods. They have no reason to represent the file sharing movement positively, and no capacity to represent it lucidly. We wanted to make a film that would explore this huge popular movement in a way that excited us, engaged us, and most importantly, focused on what we know to be the positive and optimistic vision many file sharers and artists (they are often one) have for the future of creativity.”
The film is not released under a Creative Commons license, but as the title already implies, the creators are happily promoting the sharing and downloading of the film. This is an interesting documentary for all who are interested in p2p and file sharing in general.