Learn more about our documentary Visit our photo gallery			PROJECTS PIRATE NATION (Working title) How Private Interest is Eating Away at the Public Domain In the near future libraries do not exist and it is illegal to share books. Copyright monitors report when and where a book is read and by whom, and everyone is taught at an early age that sharing a book is wrong - something only a pirate would do. This vision of the future, as portrayed in Richard Stallman's short story, Right to Read, is not as far off as one would believe. Increasingly frequent extensions of copyright legislation are crippling the public domain and making it more and more difficult to access information despite the promise of the Internet. Some corporations built their intellectual property on the work of others (think Disney's Pinocchio). Today these same corporations are prosecuting individual artists who in turn build on that property, branding them "pirates." PIRATE NATION intends to show the irony of these hypocrisies, and will make this issue understandable and entertaining to the general public by exposing the reality of increasingly restrictive corporate control over access to information. We will illustrate how grassroots organizers, artists, computer scientists and academics are working together to create universal access to knowledge and advocate for a vibrant public domain. One example is the Internet Bookmobile, a digital library filled with public domain books that can be printed on-demand, bound and given away for free. Individuals and organizations like this are raising awareness about the dwindling public domain, and are working to shrink the digital divide and enable more people to access information, books and education. Learn more about our documentary << PROJECTS <<< HOME