Filesharing
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transmediale 2015: Nicolas Maigret, BitTorrent and The Pirate Cinema
Since 1988 transmediale has been one of Europe’s premiere events for showcasing transmedia and technology for art and narrative and nonfiction storytelling. Director Kristoffer Gansing (who spoke with Filmmaker last year) and his team continue to assemble cutting-edge films, installations, performances, workshops, and other events, turning the House of World Cultures in Berlin into a hub for all things new media. It ran last week, and I spoke with a number of artists who presented video-based pieces at the festival. Nicolas Maigret is a French artist who has been active since 2001. His work explores the internal functioning of media like the Internet by making its processes — […]
by Randy Astle on Feb 23, 2015 -
An Independent Filmmaker Confronts Piracy
Producer Matt Compton says he knew the feature he produced — a “thinking man’s horror film,” Midnight Son, directed by Scott Leberecht — would eventually be pirated. “I always knew the film would end up on the torrent sites,” he writes in an email, “and that there would be nothing I could do about it. If the major studios can’t stop piracy, surely an indie producer such as myself can do nothing.” But he wasn’t prepared for his film to show up three weeks before the film was commercially available, when whatever word-of-mouth to be gained by the filesharing couldn’t […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 6, 2012 -
MEDAGLIA’S “KITTY, KITTY” ON VODO
Filmmaker webmaster Michael Medaglia is also a talented director; I really liked his short, Kitty, Kitty — an eerie piece of psychological horror that reminded me of early Cronenberg. Here’s how he describes it: Kitty, Kitty is a short film about love, cats and brain parasites. The disturbing short was inspired by Toxoplasmosis, a disease caused by a brain parasite that can change human behavior and is believe to affect up to a third of the world population. This weekend Medaglia released the film for free on VODO.net, a website that turns filesharing and torrents into a legitimate distribution avenue […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 14, 2011 -
SHARING THE WEALTH
A depressing element of the music filesharing revolution has been the suggestion by its proponents that tour income and t-shirt sales will be the new revenue model for bands losing the royalties they would have (in a perfect world) received from consumers buying their music. I’ve wondered, what if a band or musician didn’t want to spend his life touring and just wanted to make records? Obviously a similar challenge is about to face filmmakers as increasing storage capacities and new digital download services arise to reshape the way films are distributed. Already sites like the Google Video Store and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 23, 2006 -
THE RIGHTS STUFF
I’ll have more to say in a future post about the situation in France involving iTunes and Apple’s proprietary “Fair Play” technology. Briefly, the French government is considering a bill which would require Apple to share it’s proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology so that a consumer could play songs downloaded on iTunes on any iPod-competing music player. This is big news for Apple, as it threatens the near-monopoly they’ve developed on portable music players and online music downloads. And as iTunes is positioned to be a market leader in movie downloads as well, anything that challenges their business model […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 22, 2006 -
WHAT IS A DARKNET?
A bit of advocacy and image rehabilitation for underground file-sharing networks by mash-up editor JD Lasica can be found here.
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 19, 2006
