Johnny Flynton: Watch The First Ever Oscar-Nominated Creative Commons Film
Note, I will send all SBD from this post to Lexi Alexander
(This is Lexi. Badass, right?)
So I suppose I'm a copyright activist.
After Snowden, I was working in Montana on privacy activism for a while. I staged two Restore the Fourth protests with varying degrees of success. I really wanted to fight against the illegal surveillance apparatus, but I was consistently frustrated by my own lack of technical abilities. I was just starting to learn to program, and it was taking me days just to struggle through simple API calls. My background was a creative one, I wanted to be a film director and a musician.
Slowly, it started to dawn on me how much of mass surveillance is based on the idea of watching you watch entertainment. Spotify, Pandora, Netflix and all the others all have a mechanism that tracks what you watch, and uses that data to try and leverage their platform.
I realized I wanted to create surveillance-free entertainment. So I got to work.
Long story short, I ended up convincing filmmaker Lexi Alexander to release her film Johnny Flynton under a CC license. I just asked her if she still owned the rights to anything she'd made. Then I explained Creative Commons (while making it as clear as possible that I am not a lawyer and cannot give legal advice.) and suggested that if she wanted to, she could put Johnny Flynton out onto bittorrent for free, and get money via Bitcoin. Our little experiment was a success, but I know that with Steemit we can be way more successful!
Johnny Flynton is the first ever Oscar-Nominated Short Film to be released into the creative commons.
The other part of this equation is that we need to provide surveillance free platforms to distribute files on. The Decentralized Library of Alexandria currently provides the best possible version of this. It's built using blockchain tech and IPFS, so it's almost completely decentralized.
