Our next PdOC Film Night will feature 'Steal This Film’ (2006/2007) at the Postdoc Centre
Please come along and get comfy with your own drinks and snacks. Guests are welcome. This event is entirely FREE and will likely finish with a visit to a nearby pub after the film. Capacity is 80 people.
Film synopsis: Steal This Film is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property produced by The League of Noble Peers and released via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol.
Part One, produced in Sweden and released in 2006, takes account of the prominent players in the Swedish piracy culture: The Pirate Bay, Piratbyran, and the Pirate Party. This film includes a critical analysis of an alleged regulatory capture performed by the Hollywood film industry 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.
Steal This Film (Part 2) (sometimes subtitled 'The Dissolving Fortress') was produced during 2007. It “examines the technological and enforcement end of the copyright wars, and on the way that using the internet makes you a copier, and how copying puts you in legal jeopardy." It discusses Mark Getty's assertion that 'intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century'. Part 2 draws parallels between the impact of the printing press and the internet in terms of making information accessible beyond a privileged group or "controllers". The argument is made that the decentralised nature of the internet makes the enforcement of conventional copyright impossible. Adding to this the internet turns consumers into producers, by way of user generated content, leading to the sharing, mashup and creation of content not motivated by financial gains. This has fundamental implications for market-based media companies. The documentary asks "How will society change" and states "This is the Future - And it has nothing to do with your bank balance".