After five years, we're finally close to releasing the documentary. Our final step is to pay the network for photos from the set of the show. These photos are extremely relevant to the story, and we can't move forward with the release of the documentary until our fees are paid to the network. This is where you come in. Help us pay the network fees so every Arrested fan can see this documentary!

So here's the great news: The movie is essentially *done*. It's filmed, edited, scored, and test-screened. Even the final sound mix, color correction, and closed captioning have already been budgeted for, thanks to the support of comics creators and fans.

We're using over 500 separate, copyrighted works in the film (400+ images, dozens of new and existing songs, and dozens of historical clips from TV, film, and newsreels). In all cases, we're seeking the global right to use footage/music/images in the documentary, in perpetuity, in all current and future mediums the film might show in. In 98% of these cases, the copyright holders have been amazingly generous, and given permission without fees, and with huge kindness.

Ultimately, it comes down to three reasons: Potential lawsuits, how those potential lawsuits limit who sees the film, and cost.... We're hoping to distribute this film globally, not just in the U.S. So even if U.S. Fair Use would allow usage in the States, we'd still need to get clearance from the copyright holders elsewhere, country by country, in places where the Fair Use/Fair Lending laws differ.... we'd need to de-encrypt it from a DVD…which is illegal under the DMCA....

There are Fair Use lawsuits still working their way through the courts, having started in 2006. So at some point you have to ask yourself: Do you want to live in court? In the chance we end up being legally in the wrong about a claim of "Fair Usage" for this or that bit of footage, the statutory damages on copyright infringement could be pretty devastating to a little indie film like this. Even the legal fees to defend one court case (from among 500 separate pieces of copyrighted work, remember) could be a huge financial hit.

Even if we were absolutely sure of our Fair Use rights, absolutely sure of our ability to win in court, and absolutely sure that we'd be willing to devote a few years and tens of thousands toward defending that in court…we'd still have to get other stake-holders to accept that same liability. Distributors, networks, broadcasters, "Errors & Omissions Insurance" underwriters -- they'd all need to be willing to take on that same risk that our Fair Use was legally sound. That could be a deal-killer: You could end up with a completed film that wouldn't be shown or broadcast anywhere.

But the biggest one, for us, is... [we] want to be artists, not litigants. We want to make a film that celebrates the art of cartooning, not fight off a Fair Use lawsuit in court.

@techdirt Here's the film. Please share it widely: youtube.com/watch?v=Ze6tG5…Peace, p

— Patrick Mureithi (@MureithiPatrick) January 6, 2013

Custom's dude @ the airport: Hello? What do you have in those bags?
Me: Some clothes and my camera equipment.
Dude: What are you doing with this equipment?
Me: I'm working on a documentary about healing from trauma after post-election violence.
Dude: Are you a press-man?
Me: No.
Dude: Where is your filming permit?
Me: I don't have one
Dude: Then we have to keep your equipment until you get a permit
Me: I find it hard to leave this equipment here after all the sacrifice it took to get it
Dude: Go talk to that lady (presumably his superior)

- - -

Lady: What are you using this equipment for?
(I explain what I did to dude)
Lady: But this happened five years ago!
Me: Yes, but the trauma has not gone away, and will not go away with time
Lady: How will it go away then?
Me: Through education about trauma and teaching various ways that we can heal
Lady: This is a very controversial film. You need a permit, and you need to leave your equipment with us until you get one.
Me: Please, madam, this is not agreeable with me
Lady: Go see that man in that office

- - -

Man in office: Where is your permit?
(The Dance repeats itself. 45 minutes in total)
Man: We'll let you go with your equipment, but you have to pay 1% of the equipment's cost, non-refundable

I pay, and scurry off to meet my father who has been patiently waiting, sipping coffee through a straw.

Karibu Kenya.

Greetings Pirate Bay!

This is 2 Player Productions here, and we hoped we could be the first to upload our new movie "Minecraft: The Story of Mojang". We've never uploaded a torrent before so hopefully this isn't all screwed up.

We wanted to come here first because we knew the movie would end up here eventually, and the best thing to do seemed to be opening a dialogue. Torrents and piracy are a way of life and it probably won't be going anywhere anytime soon. There are many people that want to punish you for that, but we have a more realistic outlook on things.

We've been there. We've all needed to do it at some point. Maybe you don't have the money. Maybe you want to try before you buy. Maybe you're pissed at us for premiering the movie on Xbox Live. These are all fine reasons. But if you feel that piracy is, in Gabe Newell's words, "a service problem," please consider that we are selling DRM free digital downloads that you can watch in whatever manner you please.

We're just three guys trying to make a living doing what we love. We love the world of video games, and we love making it real. If you buy the movie, you support those efforts. The reason we Kickstarted this movie in the first place was that we didn't have enough money to make it ourselves, and even then, we still put A LOT of our own money into it. Not to mention nearly two years of work.

Watch the movie. Hopefully you'll like it, and understand what we're trying to do. Please consider supporting us by buying the $8 DRM-free digital download of the movie at www.theminecraftmovie.com, or the $20 DVD from www.fangamer.net.

We've worked with a lot of amazing people in the games industry and had the incredible fortune to make some great films the way we wanted to make them. Please consider helping us continue on this path. The best has yet to come.

-2pp

But by choosing to approach the trademark infringement question in the way that it did, the court perpetuated certain problems that we flagged in our brief. Applying the standard infringement factors to critical speech forces to the court to come to some awkward conclusions about how the factors should apply, and leaves open some potentially odd results in future cases. This analytic tension in applying a likelihood of confusion analysis to critical speech permeates the majority’s analysis. Some highlights follow below:

Similarity of the parties' goods: This is a classic factor in trademark infringement analysis, and when applied to two market rivals using similar marks to sell their goods it makes a great deal of sense: the more similar the goods are, the more likely a consumer may be confused looking at those goods. But here the application makes no sense whatsoever.

The court here notes (quite correctly) that Jenzabar sells educational software systems and Long Bow makes documentary films. Those two fields are unrelated, and thus the court held that this factor favors Long Bow. That is convenient for Long Bow, but in this context it is irrelevant. Consumers looking at critical speech are not any more likely to be confused as to the origin of the speech because it comes from a market competitor. To hold this as relevant is to say that Reed Elsevier or the New York Times would be more successful in attacking critical speech on trademark grounds, because those publishing criticism usually do so at media and publishing companies.

Long Bow Group burned though more than $250,000 in legal fees on preliminary motions and discovery, and veered close to bankruptcy before it found public interest lawyers who were willing to assume responsibility for the litigation; the Appeals Court upheld summary judgment after a review of a joint appendix more than 2700 pages long. Unlike other recent decisions that dismissed claims of “initial interest confusion” out of hand, such as because the Internet critic was not benefitting financially, or because “momentary confusion [is] dispelled the moment the Internet user reaches [underlying] site,” the Appeals Court conducted a lengthy analysis of the summary judgment record to reach that conclusion. To be sure, many of the undisputed facts on which the court relied are likely to be found in most cases where a critic’s page about a trademark holder has appeared prominently in the search results. In the end, the only evidence Jenzabar had was the search result itself, and the Appeals Court properly ruled that this is simply not enough to avoid summary judgment. Yet if avoidance of a trial depends on a painstaking analysis of a detailed summary judgment record—and if future abusive trademark litigants can avoid early summary judgment by arguing that they hope to compile a better record through extensive (and expensive) discovery—there will be many Internet critics who will find the cost of a legal defense too great a barrier to continued exercise of their free speech rights.

Another aspect of the decision that may take litigation in this area a step backward is the apparent acceptance of a confusing expert’s affidavit as being sufficient to create an issue about whether inclusion of a trademark in a keyword meta tag can raise the search ranking of a page containing that meta tag.  The Appeals Court acknowledged official statements by Google, cited by the Ninth Circuit and the McCarthy treatise, to the effect that search engines no longer take account of the keyword meta tag, but if a wealthy litigant can avoid summary judgment by hiring an expert witness who is willing to say whatever he needs to say to get paid (and we thought that the expert very carefully tiptoed around the issue of the impact of keyword meta tags, rather than addressing them directly), the social utility of the truth as a bar to litigation is substantially reduced.

The 102-minute documentary deconstructs hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel “The Shining” — mostly by showing sequences from the actual film, a copyrighted work owned by Warner Bros. Since its Sundance debut in January, Ascher’s film has been acquired for distribution by IFC Midnight and snagged slots in the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight and Toronto film festival’s Vanguard sidebars. It will have an awards-qualifying run at the end of the year followed by a March release.

For this one, Ascher has no choice but to go down the rabbit hole of proving that the footage he’s used falls under fair use, which would prevent him from having to pay hefty licensing fees to WB or being sued for showing the film in theaters.

According to Donaldson, clearing the rights for a mere 30-second clip from a studio film can cost between $6,000 and $8,000, an astronomical figure for an independently produced film. He often gets the studio to lower its fee after sending a package complete with a DVD on fair use and examples of litigation over the years. In one instance with a studio last year, he got the fee dropped from $45,000 to $15,000.

This negotiating of fees has been a contentious subject for copyright holders who feel they are being exploited. “This is where I take [Donaldson] to task,” says Cathy Carapella, who handles rights and clearances for Global ImageWorks and speaks on fair-use issues for the nonprofit Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors. “If it’s fair use, why offer to pay for anything?”

The film, the second-highest-grossing political documentary in U.S. box-office history, has made $32 million domestically since opening in mid July but took in only $938,000 during the recent weekend for a per-screen average of $771, down 27 percent from $1,060 per screen in the previous weekend, according to BoxOfficeMojo. Overall, the movie's box-office dropped 53 percent in the most recent weekend compared with the previous one, its largest decline since opening 10 weeks ago.

While such a drop isn't unusual for a movie during the course of a week -- especially when the theater count dropped from 1,876 to 1,216 -- filmmakers nevertheless say box-office results were artificially depressed for two reasons: a disinformation campaign spreading the false rumor that Fox News Channel would be showing the movie in its entirety Sunday and a pirated version of the film showing up on YouTube this weekend.

“The reports of the movie appearing on Fox before the election are completely untrue," Dinesh D’Souza declared, "and we strongly suspect that they are the result of dirty tricks by our opponents who spread this rumor in order to confuse the general public and keep them from going to their local theaters."

If so, what an idiotic waste of time on the part of D’Souza’s and 2016 Obama’s America‘s "opponents." After all, the 2016 movie is fast on its way out.

So, why on earth would anyone in his/her right (or left, as the case may be) mind want to keep people "from going to their local theaters" to watch a movie that so few moviegoers care about at this stage? If an organized anti-2016 Obama’s America effort truly exists, then those guys have arrived on the scene a little too late. They should have acted five weeks ago, when the 2016 movie began its initially popular expansion.

Amid its struggle to contain damage from the WikiLeaks revelations, the State Department announced Saturday that "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" has been selected as one of 18 films that will tour the world this year as part of its "American Documentary Showcase" program.

Ellsberg, whom the film portrays as a whistleblower of conscience, has been a champion of Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the alleged leaker of the documents who is currently jailed. He has also spoken in defence of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who may also face charges for publishing classified information.

I've just downloaded the torrent, and while the image quality and sound quality is excellent, you've made a mistake.

The DVD, as I've mentioned before, is interactive with a non-interactive version as well. To accomplish this and save space on the DVD (since it's packed with stuff), I have a set of discrete tracks that are either summoned (via the interactive choice) or played as a playlist (via the non-interactive choice). Unintentionally (and I do really mean it, it was unintentional), this has made the movie a tad harder to rip, because the movie is in pieces scattered throughout the DVD, and not in any obvious sequential order.

Playing the AVI that FLAiR has released shows that you have ripped only some of the tracks, and ripped one extra one that shouldn't be in there.

I think it's natural that you support stuff you believe in. The people who support our movie obviously don't believe in the services that the movie and record industries are offering them. To me it's much more ironic that the corporations are claiming that the system used to be just and beneficial to artists before the internet came around. It never was.

Filesharing is great marketing, I don't mind people marketing my work.

"I decided the film wasn't going to change a lot in this world," Glaser said on the witness stand in a case involving six men claiming they were left sterile by pesticide exposure. "I decided to work with the firm and help with the legal process...I decided to use the film for that purpose."

• Berlinger has to turn over all footage showing (1) plaintiffs' counsel in Chevron's civil lawsuit in Ecuador, (2) private or court-appointed experts, and (3) current or former Ecuadorian officials;
• Chevron can only use the material produced for litigation, arbitration or submission to official government bodies;
• Chevron must pay for all reasonable costs incurred by Berlinger in turning over the footage; and
• The district court below shall maintain jurisdiction to address any disputes relating to the release of the footage.