At the extremes, those who think online filesharing helps artists¹ may see this story as logical and evidence for their beliefs, and those who assume illegal downloads of movies and music always hurts content creators may see this as a joke (funny or not), but I think it’s pretty cool that a little independent film has generated a lot of positive buzz through word-of-mouth reviews from people who illegally downloaded the film –and the producer of The Man From Earth has officially thanked these movie “pirates”. To wit:

“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!”

All’s well that ends well.

Technorati Tags: film

1. I know I’ve discovered more artists and purchased more music due to the existence of p2p technologies, from napster to gnutella. [↩]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 6:59 pm and is filed under Filmmaking, Geeky, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.