blog.starwreck.com

I just got over feeling warm and fuzzy about my copy of NIN’s Ghosts arriving in it’s physical form when NIN fires another salvo on the dusty old music industry.

They’ve released a new album again - and this time completely for free. And even better, it’s licenced under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share-alike license. It’s a bunch of big words, but basicly means you can share the album with your friends, remix and sample to your hearts content as long as it’s not for commercial purposes and you let others do the same to the stuff you create.

To quote a finnish commercial. “That’s pretty fair”.

And yes, we’re going to do the same with the Iron Sky teaser if you’re wondering. But the remix pack will be released bit later, simply because we need some time to put it together.

If there’s something that pisses me off is BUYING a dvd and having to watch trough and an anti-piracy ad. I mean, it’s not just that they say downloading movies is as bad as stealing a car or mugging old ladies, but I’ve BOUGHT the freaking disc and these asshats think I’m a pirate. Not to mention that if I had downloaded the movie, it wouldn’t have any messages insulting me…

And yeah, I know this is old news, the thing is just that I already thought the messages had vanished. I haven’t seen them on Finnish DVD’s in a long time - but discs bought from England still seem to have them.

And more than that that rant was a good excuse to post a video from either Bruce or Sheila:

To think of it, if stealing a car is as bad as downloading a movie then, well, I’d like a nicer car…

According to TorrentFreak the lates member of the “getting this internet thing” club is Erik Wilkinson, producer of the scifi film Man from Earth. He just thanked pirates for promoting his Film:

Wilkinson was pleasantly surprised by all the attention. He explained in his email to RLSlog that the people who illegally downloaded his film actually helped to promote it.

He writes: “Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download. Most of the feedback from everyone who has downloaded “The Man From Earth” has been overwhelmingly positive. People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy on the net!”

Hopefully the other producers (IMDb lists six) and the crew are as understanding. It’s not a fun situation for anyone if half the people get the benefits of online distribution but the people holding the other half of the money thinks all this downloading humbug is the Devil’s work.

As for me, this is one film that goes straight to my have-to-watch list. Not because of a producer who knows the value of good publicity, but because it sounds damn interesting.

Update: There’s also a message to people who have downloaded the film on their MySpace blog, asking people to make a small donation if they liked the film. There is some harsher words there, but it’s still reasoanable.