Later this year, the League of Noble Peers plans to release the third part in the series, covering the Pirate Bay story from the day it was raided in 2006, right up to the trial currently taking place. Judging from the massive attention the trial is attracting, we have no doubt that the latest film in the series will be at least as popular as its predecessors.

Producer Jamie King told TorrentFreak that the trial edition, released just an hour ago, should be seen as part 2.5 – a trial for the ‘final cut’ so to speak. It includes some new material and shows how Peter Sunde (Brokep) and Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) prepared for the court case, together with a pretty funny reenactment of the police interrogations.

The League of Noble Peers is currently shooting at the spectrial in Stockholm for the ‘final cut’. In the days to come we will release some exclusive footage of the trial here on TorrentFreak.

As always, the Steal This Film project is backed by many members of the BitTorrent community. IsoHunt is currently seeding the film on a 50Mbit line, and Mininova is helping out as well. As the League of Noble Peers say, we’re all on trial today.

The film can be downloaded at the STF website, please share, remix and redistribute!

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The League of Noble Peers, creators of Steal This Film, have been very upbeat about donations to the project and the possibilities of P2P for creativity. However, despite hundreds of donations, the project still isn’t out of the red yet. All is not lost, though. Fans of the Steal This Film series have another chance to help the Peers as they raise money to continue the project.

Steal This Film II is currently running 3rd in the Babelgum Online Film Festival’s documentary category. Babelgum is a Joost-like service that allows you watch free and full length videos, full screen.

Babelgum will add up the votes of users from their professional jury to find three films in each category to be judged by Spike Lee. If they win their category, the Peers stand to win $30,000 (EU20,000) towards the project.

All you have to do to help is download the client, search for “Steal This Film” and cast your vote to let the jury know what you think.

“It sucks to have to download a client, we know, but the cash would come in handy for the next phase of the film,’ said Jamie King of the League of Noble Peers. “And it would be fun to meet Spike – we dug ‘25th Hour‘! Big thanks to anyone who takes time out to lend us their support again.”

Of course, Steal This Film remains free to download and redistribute at stealthisfilm.com. For those who haven’t seen it yet, it’s a must watch.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

When Part 1 was released, “The League of Noble Peers” asked downloaders to donate $1 (or more) if they wanted to support the project. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority donated just that. However, for the new release the majority donated $15 or more. Why? Well it could be that donators were motivated by a mystery gift they were offered when they gave more than $15, but there are alternative explanations as to why pirates may be more generous than people assume.

Jamie King, producer of the film gives the following explanation on his blog: “Over 90% of people donating are deciding to go over the artificial $15 threshold we set. But I don’t think people literally ‘want that gift’; I think they want an excuse to be generous!”

This could be true, the people who donate (still only a small percentage) are obviously dedicated to the cause, but there is more. It could also be that they donate more because they now don’t have an excuse to donate only $1, even pirates don’t want to look miserly. Most importantly perhaps, is that it shows that it can be wise to avoid psychological reactance, and leave the choice about what to donate or spend on a film or a music album up to the consumer. It is a challenge to build business models around free will and free content, but the Steal This Film project shows that there are opportunities.

Another interesting point raised by Jamie in his post is the need for alternative payment models. Sure, PayPal works but they take away too much money – it’s replacing one money sucking middleman with another. Take the Radiohead release for example, you could get the album virtually for free, but you still had to pay the credit card company nearly $1. This is probably why most people decided to pirate the album, instead of getting it for “free”. It seems that The Pirate Bay agrees on this, as they are working on a p2p based payment model that will probably be released by the and of this month.

TorrentFreak briefly talked to Brokep about this upcoming project a while ago, unfortunately we are not allowed to give you any more details, but it’s certainly an interesting project with a lot of potential. Brokep did reveal a bit on Jamie’s blog as he said: “I think that people will pay if there’s a simple solution. The payment solutions of today are not built for the new, network economy — they’re built around the old one. As we move away from the old economy, we’re here without a new payment solution.”

We will definitely keep you informed on this upcoming project. BitTorrent opens up possibilities for independent filmmakers. Distribution costs are now non-existent, and new business models are slowly starting to emerge. The future of film making looks bright and will be in part funded and formed by the innovators who were once called pirates.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Steal This Film 1 already was a huge success with nearly 3 million downloads, and we think this will be no different for part 2. The film, again produced by The League of Noble Peers, features some people from the BitTorrent community such as Erik from mininova and Peter (aka Brokep) from The Pirate Bay. Dan Glickman from the MPAA also makes a short appearance stating that they will never be able to stop piracy, but I guess we already knew that.

Jamie King of the League Of Noble Peers was answering chat requests today, so we caught up with him to ask a couple of questions:

TF: You must be excited about releasing the film finally. What’s been the delay?

JK: To be honest, the film simply took a lot longer than we’d imagined to make — it’s a big step forward from STF I for us. And then we got sidetracked with The Oil Of The 21st Century, a conference some of us were involved in organising in Berlin this year. It was great and we got to preview the film there for some friends, but we’re sorry to everyone who was waiting. We’re sure no one has been that upset!

TF: Are you working with anyone to promote the film this time?

JK: Of course we’ll be working with The Pirate Bay again to do a bit of promotion, as we’ve really discussed the project a lot with those guys. We’ve also got to know the people at Mininova who’ll be seeding the torrent and promoting it a bit. I was also really pleased to hear that BitTorrent themselves will be featuring the film since we met them during a screening of STF II in Amsterdam. We’re really up for working with anyone who’d like to feature STEAL THIS FILM so get in touch!

TF: Is there a streaming version anywhere?

JK: We discussed this a lot. There will be a streaming version (and of course we can’t and wouldn’t want to prevent anyone transcoding it and uploading it whereever they like) but right now, it’s about BitTorrent. With The Pirate Bay and Mininova seeding it, there shouldn’t be any problem with the download speeds.

TF: Are you asking for donations?

JK: Yes, but not for this film :D We have a new project in development — based around our ‘Oil Of The 21st Century’ idea — and we’re headed out to Asia in the new year to start investigating. We’re asking anyone who wants to help us with this project to donate $5 or more (or whatever they can afford really) to donate@stealthisfilm.com. Oh! And we’re giving away a secret giftpack to anyone who donates $15 or more.

TF: Any final words?

JK: Only that we’re really pleased to be releasing STF II after more than a year and we’re looking forward to all the argument we hope it will generate. And we’d like to say a massive thanks to everyone who supported us so far. You rock.

—

You can download Steal This Film 2 over here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The film, again produced by The League of Noble Peers, features some people from the BitTorrent community such as Erik from mininova and Peter (aka Brokep) from The Pirate Bay. Dan Glickman from the MPAA also makes a short appearance stating that they will never be able to stop piracy, but I guess we already knew that.

Most importantly, STFII shows us that filesharing is here to stay, it is a part of our lives and will shape our future.

A reliable source informed us that the camming took place during the first screening of the documentary at the “Oil of the 21st Century” conference in Berlin two weeks ago. TorrentFreak was represented at the conference in question, but we deny any involvement in this matter.

Jamie King, producer of STFII, told TorrentFreak in response to the leak: “We think people should better not watch it, as we’ll track them down via haxxoring their IPs and sue their asses off,” he continues “Seriously, we’re delighted anyone would want to make a cam of STFII. We hope anyone that keen to watch it will enjoy it despite the dip in quality, and for those that want to wait, it’s only a few days until release.”

You can steal the CAM version at The Pirate Bay. We have to warn you though, the quality is pretty bad, like most cammed movies. STFII will officially be released in a few days including fully subtitled, searchable archives.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.