Open Media Review

Film Festival Soliciting Submissions via File Sharing

This story doesn’t exactly involve open media, per se, but I thought it was a novel use of an open platform. The organizers of the Cinequest Film Festival are use file sharing to handling submission and viewer voting on potential entrants.

I am a little annoyed at the editorial remarks from the AP piece, which is quick to suggest that the use of file sharing for the festival will lead to widespread pirating of these works should they achieve commercial success. The reality is, if they are successful, they will be pirated, regardless, as a cost of doing business.

The fact that the organizers are willing to embrace new distribution models says more about their cluefulness than any FUD about increased risk of piracy. And I applaud their choice in particular for also facilitating the voting process. It seems like a very natural fit and stands in stark contrast to the draconian measures that were enforced until recently on Oscar nomination screeners to combat the same spurious piracy threat.