BitTorrent, Uncensoring Independent Filmmakers
Written by Ben Jones on January 09, 2008As previously shown, BitTorrent can be a boon to the independent film-maker. Usually a lack of money restricts the distribution of a film, but occasionally the content works against it. As well as the promotion of new, aspiring talent, torrents can be used to spread films which may be politically discouraged from more usual methods.
One such example is the recent release of ‘Route Irish‘, a film mainly about the protests at Shannon Airport in Ireland, over its assistance to the United States, in the latter’s actions against Afghanistan, and Iraq. Produced through Indymedia Ireland, it is a 90 minute documentary compiling footage donated over the last few years to its editor, Eamonn Crudden. “10 peoples footage,” he replied when asked about the video’s source, “copyleft is what they had in common and it made this film possible really.”
Crudden claims that the film would not gain coverage in Ireland, due to certain clips contained in the film, pointing out the American taking pictures around 16 minutes into the film, to TorrentFreak as an example. Usually, such low-budget independent releases would have been put on videotape, copied a few dozen times, and passed around those already interested in the topic, a videographic samizdat as it were. With the advent of BitTorrent, the reach of the film-maker has exploded.
When asked why he decided to to release via BitTorrent, Crudden, who described himself as ‘pretty untechnical’, said “Basic answer is I saw Steal this Film and read I stuff kind of in an academic way by Eben Moglen and an Irish guy called Alan Toner and they just argued that this was the maximum efficient system in history for distributing stuff. I also thought it might get out of an activist ghetto that way too.” And get out of the ghetto it has. Whereas, he explained, it used to take “months and months to get rid of 100 VHS tapes of a documentary back in the day,” according to the tracker stats, since its release it was downloaded more than 1000 times.
One of the comments to the first part asked “can we get the cost to make a film low enough to enable a blue-collar moviemaker scene?” Eamonn thinks so, and is working on that, as a part time tutor in film production in Queens University, Belfast. He also has a word of warning for the major Hollywood studios. “[It] makes entry level at a global level easy for people without gatekeepers and cliques determining what gets made. It will get very interesting when a generation really familiar with it start bypassing institutional production AS WELL AS distribution”
The production and dissemination of work which may otherwise be censored is a significant non infringing use of P2P that no court should be quick to dismiss. No court that values free speech anyway.
The torrent for Route Irish is available here.
Previously: The Pirate’s Dilemma
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17 Responses
Bittorrent technology works, stop fighting it and embrace it, thats your only choice anyway unless you wanna be poor.
Beyond their potential for capital, our content systems have enormous potential to change the world and the people in it. Whether ir will be for good or ill is entirely dependant upon our envolvement to ensure that technology continues to liberate and connect us, rather than isolate and control.
Nice to see more independants getting on the bandwagon.
Great News!
Thanks TF.
My fav BitTorrent news site is TF :)
Keep up the great work! and please add a small donate button, so we could donate a small amount to keep TF alive !
Agree with the donate button
[quote comment="259306"]Agree with the donate button[/quote]
Thanks guys, but we’re ok for now.
If you want to donate, help these kids out!
who cares, am i right ladies?
If people are only realizing this now… ehh..
really.. ehh…
the more people on this bandwagon the better, im Dl this now.
and as for the donate thing, dont you sell t-shirts? that helps you out dont it?
Yay for indymedia, I’ll download this now.
While the subject of the article is interesting and enlightening, its title is ridiculous. The inability to get a film released because nobody likes it enough to distribute it has nothing to do with censorship. Censorship is about an authority overtly *preventing* people from expressing themselves, generally because of a work’s moral or political content. By characterizing the previous difficulty in distributing movies as censorship, you distort the meaning of the word and in doing so make it harder for people to recognize real censorship when it happens. Please don’t do that!
I approve of this film/author/producer/method/thread/post/site/revolution
[quote comment="259443"]While the subject of the article is interesting and enlightening, its title is ridiculous. The inability to get a film released because nobody likes it enough to distribute it has nothing to do with censorship. Censorship is about an authority overtly *preventing* people from expressing themselves, generally because of a work’s moral or political content. By characterizing the previous difficulty in distributing movies as censorship, you distort the meaning of the word and in doing so make it harder for people to recognize real censorship when it happens. Please don’t do that![/quote]
As it is, right now, outside of bittorrent, and p2p, this film would have no distribution other than Eamonn copying videos and handing them out as he has in the past. The state broadcaster, RTE, will not touch it, neither will anyone else, because some of the content is deemed to be overly politically sensitive. That certainly sounds like censorship to me. Also, at no point did anyone say ‘it wasn’t distributed, because no-one liked it. I grew up in Liverpool, and have spent a lot of time in Ireland - north and south - and I doubt this would be shown, for political reasons, on either side of the border.
As an Irish citizen, I can assure you this would not be shown/distributed in Ireland by regular media companies. The things spoken about in the documentary are still ungoing, and the government is the same too.
I look forward to watching this.
This is an excellent use of P2P technology. With the content going straight from producer to consumer sort of makes you wonder why all those studio executives think they are required.
Artists can handle the distribution themselves these days for almost no cost. Makes the typical pie chart showing the cost of a DVD look even more ridiculous!
[quote comment="259884"]
With the content going straight from producer to consumer sort of makes you wonder why all those studio executives think they are required[/quote]
they are not required.
they can take those pie charts and shove them were the sun dont shine.
Good news! We like to read it. We are from Russia
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