Steal This Film: Documentary on the Swedish piracy movement
Part one of a documentary on the Swedish piracy movement has been released and it sheds interesting light on the attitude of the Swedish people and the pressure brought to bear by the US government upon them. For anyone who hasn't been following the raid on The Pirate Bay, or the formation of The Pirate Party (a political party whose platform includes Piracy as its main point), part one of "Steal This Film" provides a worthy primer on the Swedish mindset surrounding copyright in the digital age.
The film's producers write, "Hopefully you'll enjoy the first part of Steal this Film ('Stockholm, summer 2006'). It achieves some, but by no means all, of our goals. To continue we need your help. this film is free for you to share, watch on your dvd player or on your ipod, or show in cinemas. But if you like the work we've done and want us to carry on, use our donate link to send us a couple of dollars or euros."
For the fashion conscious downloader, there are also T-shirts available to help fund the second installment.
[Via Boing Boing]
After spending the better part of an hour on 
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bob Jones said 6:15PM on 8-24-2006
Those swedes are a whiny bunch, damn hippies.
Why they believe they should be able to do whatever possible with other peoples work, just because they want to - is insane, poor hippy whiners not getting everything for free - boo hoo!
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tpp said 12:52PM on 8-25-2006
Wow Bob, that there was some great trolling.
You would probably be surprised to know that's not exactly what those whiny damn hippy Swedes are up to.
Educate yourself: http://www2.piratpartiet.se/international/english
They're a pro-consumer party above all.
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Swedish Dude said 3:42PM on 8-27-2006
I think that with such an extreme (and stupid) administration that the U.S. has now, people do not want to take their advice anymore. In Scandinavia, we have something called "allemannsretten" - meaning everyone should feel free to pick berries, mushrooms, and utilize the common forest space. Now people should be free to share culture. The file-sharers want to redefine copyright as something different from American predatory gangster capitalism. As the young Swedish woman says, she feels quite the opposite of the Americans about them loosing their work - first of all they obviously that they are sick to their stomach with American culture, which is seen as superficial and unsophisticated by many Europeans. And apart from that they want a diversification of the music business with more local acts and less commercial speculation - leading to better music. How can they be said to be the ones that are wrong, and labelled "pirates"? They hardly can. In fact, the Europeans are right to think that the American capitalists that want a nazi copyright regime are as much "pirates", if not more. The MPAA has even borrowed the ridiculous vocabulary of the Bush administration "no safe harbors for pirates" - I hope Hollywood goes bankrupt, to be frank. I don't want a commercial nazi regime pressured on me by WTO fanatics. Reform the WTO, accept Europeans as they are. After all, we are the most cultivate people on the planet, and a far older people than the unexperienced teenagers in the U.S. Do you think it's a coincidence that Canada has implemented some of its most liberal laws ever during the reign of the Bush fanatics? I don't, and I hope it won't stop there. If it wasn't for the elitocracy in the EUropean Union. So I hope people resist, and continue to do so. We won't accept this undemocratic trampling on our right to feel free and share culture. Copyright needs to be abolished. Intellectual property is a terrible concept. Noone has the right to own my thoughts, to erect a tent around thoughts that can be thought by other people. Then people become shallow. We need to be allowed to borrow. This has gone too far!
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