STEAL THIS FILM
A group of people, friends of those running the popular Bittorrent tracker called The Pirate Bay, have made a movie on filesharing called “Steal This Film“. You can visit the website and download the movie for free (various formats available) using a Bittorrent client.
As you may already know, organizations in the US like the Motion Picture Ass. of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) are constantly in the news with new lawsuits against (dead) filesharers and companies with filesharing software who don’t follow their rules. In May 2006 they finally got Swedish officials to raid the ISP where the Pirate Bay is being hosted and brought down the website. Orders came from top levels of the US administration to the Swedish Minister of Justice demanding that they do something about the Pirate Bay. However, that move massively backfired, causing protests in Sweden and the Swedisch government even being sued because of the raid.
Needless to say, the Pirate Bay website was back online in 3 days, and fully functional within a week. All of this and more is discussed in the movie. They’ve now even built in redundancy in their system, with backup systems in other countries ready to go online as soon as one of their locations gets taken down again.
Looks like the MPAA and RIAA are going to have a very difficult time with these guys. They’ve now even taken it a step further, and are internationally offering P2P anonymity on one of their latest filesharing services.
According to the Party, its new network is a ‘dark net’, which means that anyone will be able to use its service without fear of being monitored or logged. Users get an untraceable address in the darknet, where they cannot be personally identified.
In a statement, Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party said there were many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet. He added that if the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check.
The right to exchange information in private is fundamental to democratic society, Falkvinge said.
And I have to say, I thoroughly enjoy their attitude and their offensive and very humorous approach to dealing with organizations like the MPAA. It’s much needed. You’d hope consumers in the US and other countries would have more backbone instead of letting organizations like the MPAA do with them whatever they like. These guys are setting an example.
And this is just the beginning. Hopefully other companies and organizations take notice and don’t resort to boneheaded strategies to keep control over users. Sony recently got a serious beating too for their DRM software on certain music CD’s which was effectively a rootkit. And even Microsoft got into this stuff with their Product Craptivation and Genuine Crapvantage software in Windows and Office. Hopefully they’ll realize sometime soon that they can’t possibly hope to win this battle.
So in case you’re looking for something to download, like say… a movie… then visit The Pirate Bay and see if you can find what you’re looking for.
By the way, “Steal this Film” has the BEST INTRO EVER!!!!
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