Music fans the world over were saddened by the news last week that Donald Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II, better known simply as Donald Byrd, had departed the earth. FACT offered a fitting tribute to one of the most influential and prolific jazz men to ever walk the planet, up there with the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock as a crucial lynchpin in the development of the artform.
Check it out here.
The filming of this project started way back, in 2008, and the producer Simon Klose had no idea that the launch of the film would initially sync with the main characters’ prison sentences. The documentary tracks the details of the story behind the Pirate Bay and it’s founders – Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm. Their torrent host site quickly grew huge and inevitably became a target of nearly every copyright enforcement group, but continues to survive today in true buccaneering/piratical (delete as appropriate) fashion.
The founders were eventually convicted in a civil and criminal copyright case in Sweden in 2009 and they were given jail sentences plus million dollar fines for working for The Pirate Bay.
The documentary was partially funded by Kickstarter, where director Simon Klose raised more than $50,000 with the rest of the funding coming from, surprisingly, the Swedish government.
And it should come as no surprise that Simon Klose made the one and a half hour long Pirate Bay documentary available in almost every possible format.
So you can watch on YouTube (embed below), download it on the Pirate Bay, also buy a copy online or pre-order DVD.
It’s all legit and you’re free to download it and share it because the movie was released under the Creative Commons Licence: CC-BY (free to share, remix and reproduce for all purposes).
“TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard is a film about Internet culture and about sharing information on-line. The nature of the problem in the documentary is the paradigm shift of the internet, where the possibility to share information is out of sync with the right to share information. By using a Creative Commons license I am making it legal for the audience to copy and share the film.”
Simon Klose, Director
the Wheat and the Chaff 