Pirate's Dilemma to bring piracy to TV?

To hear Matt Mason tell it, if you want to change the world your best bet is not realpolitik, but innovative piracy.

A former music journalist and club DJ, Mason wrote The Pirate's Dilemma, published earlier this year, to describe how open-source culture fuels innovation—how actions that laws label as piracy are often more creative than destructive.

Citing artists like Andy Warhol (a pirate for re-appropriating copyrighted images), rappers like 50 Cent (a pirate for using samples), inventors like Thomas Edison (a pirate for inventing the gramophone) and innovators like Dr. Yuref Hamied (a pirate for producing affordable anti-HIV drugs for the Third World), Mason traces this shadowy politics of intellectual property laws from history to future. Then last month, in a form-meets-function move, Mason convinced U.S. and UK publishers to follow the book's own credo and provide the text as a free PDF, available online.

Another small step forward for Pirate's this past week: a short trailer for a possible TV series or documentary, put together by Mason, Heroes executive producer Jesse Alexander and Current TV producers Mark Kotlinski and John Carluccio. Like the Pirate's Dilemma blog, which regularly updates the intellectual property discussion (recent stories have involved a Kid Rock outburst and the new Girl Talk album), the promo features Mason narrating current and historical arguments for a more open-source culture with spliced-together clips from anti-piracy TV spots and other pertinent commercial video.

"What if pirates aren't always the bad guys?" Mason probes in the opening minute. "What if pirates are some of the most creative people on the planet?" With mash-ups nearing fever pitch and DJs like Philadelphia's Diplo hunting and gathering sounds from sources worldwide (see Paste's feature in August's International Issue), the question—and Mason's Pirate's Dilemma path—seems ones well worth watching evolve.



Related links:
ThePiratesDilemma.com
Matt Mason Keynote Speech on The Pirate's Dilemma
Free The Pirate's Dilemma book download

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