Julien McArdle

Has the script for this documentary ever evolved. A year ago, I started working on a film that was meant to bring coverage to what I perceived to be a really misrepresented issue. I believed that mainstream media was doing a poor job of explaining just what was going on with piracy, and relying too heavily on corporate press releases to form their opinions. I wanted to use the documentary to voice the opinion of the consumer-activism side. Naive, I know.

But somewhere down the road, I grew up (thank god.) I started interviewing people, and I realised that the agencies within the industry were extremely misunderstood themselves. Interviewees outlined their very valid justifications, and explained the reasoning behind their logic. I found that the objections for many people on both sides of the issue stemmed from misunderstandings. I was delighted to encounter some people that were incredibly unbiased themselves, such as a lady from a certain organization to whom I spoke with today.

There’s always three sides to a story. And with this film, I aim to report them all. No bias. My aim isn’t to persuade audiences to any one side, but to say “You watched the movie. These are all the facts I could get for you. Now you form your own views.” At the same time, I want to satisfy all the interviewees in the film, hoping they will say “My argument is well represented. Now its up to the viewer to decide what’s right.”

To eliminate potential for bias, the narrator’s only function is to link interviews and explaing definitions of technical terms which may not have been defined properly during interviews. Furthermore, I will insure that the documentary represents the best of the arguments from each side; and that the editing is done in a fashion which does not misrepresent any perspective.

Because I’m really feeling the squeeze financially, I decided to create a live “donations” page for the Piracy Documentary. This goes against my original statement that I’d rather have the film finished first – but really, funds come in more handy when you’re actually making use of them.

Well no less than an hour after the page went live, someone donated. And it was alot more than I would expected anyone to give. So I want to extend my thanks to Luxor, for your kind generosity. The only way I can make it up to you is to make the best film I can.

Thank you.

Today I had the pleasure of interviewing the head of Creative Commons Canada. And on that topic, I decided my license:

	Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
	Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
	No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

The “No Derivative Works” is to avoid potential problems caused by having industry reps. getting footage of them spread in other less-than-complimentary works. This is more protection for me than anything else. The raw interviews will also be released in this format.

Furthermore, I’m releasing all stock footage to the Public Domain. This is a few hours worth of scenic shots of the cities of Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal. Actually, the Montreal footage is pretty bad; but there’s some decent tidbits in there.

So the site for the Piracy Documentary is now up! Check it out at:
www.piracydocumentary.com

I was able to design the site from scratch in under two hours. This is thanks in large part to NVU, an open-source Dreamweaver equivalent. The learning curve is also pretty shallow: before I installed it less than two hours ago, I had never dealt with a WYSIWYG editor other than the horrid Frontpage.

That said, the program does pitch in bits of illogical/useless code. However, its very minimal, and easy to clean up. Worth a gander.

As the interviews draw to a close, I’m faced with a difficult dilema:

To go Creative Commons, or not to.

Here’s why this is an issue. I have so far contacted 36 corporate/governmental/individual entities. These people have given me permission to film them, or on their location (well not all – see a few posts back). They’ve given me this permission knowing that the film would be distributed. If I release it CC, and someone plays with the video and releases another version out, then they’d have to get permission from all those people too to release their film. Even though this is their problem, I’d be seen as a conduit to promote some kind of infringement. I have no qualms people playing with my video – in fact I want this to go public domain in 5 years.

That’s assuming I don’t use any copyrighted materials in the movie of course. I was in the midst of negotiating with CTV and G4TechTV to get some footage of theirs on my film. If I release this under the CC, I cannot use any copyrighted materials like that at all. That’s because I would become a conduit of copyright infringement, as it would be illegal for others to re-release the film without first getting permission from those TV corps. (Yet under the CC lisence I’d have, others can re-distribute – you can see how I would be the one pursued here.)

And another issue: distribution. If I go CC, or even mention public domain, then my hopes of distributing the film via the National Film Board are scrapped. If I don’t go CC, I can’t use the music I have from Magnatune for the initial non-commercial stage of this film. This music is a big key to the film. Your thoughts?

Either way I’m screwed.