Category: Life

Finished off another interview today. Added the details to the official site (piracydocumentary.com), and added new screenshots to the Gallery.

 

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.

I was able to clear the rights to film indoors in two buildings of my choosing. The management of these locations have asked that they remain anonymous, and that I avoid using any footage that could identify their buildings. This is a request I have accepted.

I walked out of these places extremely surprised at how easy the process of clearing these rights was. No NDAs; just lots of common sense. It was a refreshing change.

I have interviews tomorrow, the day after, and Saturday.

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.

Got in contact with the people over at CTV. It would cost me more than my entire budget to license 20 seconds worth of footage. Therefore, I dropped it [the footage was going to originally serve as the intro to the doc]. Also dropping some other footage taken from G4|TechTV on Magnatune. It was of poor quality, and the licensing would be just as exhorbitant.

That also means that I can now release the film under Creative Commons, *as long as people cannot modify it and release it publicly* [why can’t they? See previous post. Essentially, it would be illegal for me to do so.] Will I release it under the CC? I just might, due to the initial marketting advantages it will give me, plus access to Magnatune’s music. This might be a godsend in disguise.

I’ll aim for my own in-house footage. Oh and my bank called – this film has driven me officially broke. But I’m so close to finishing it that I’ll keep doing it ’till its done.