Wednesday, in Stockholm

It’s Wednesday, I’m in Stockholm, and about to meet a journalist from the Swedish film news – filmnyheterna - and I’m trying to gather my thoughts. People have asked me if I’m not afraid that we have offended “the system” by doing what we have done. Well, this makes me think of how we came up with the idea in the first place. The dream of a release on the internet has been around for a long time, but we didn’t have either the knowledge or the time to make it come true ourselves.

Some time ago we met Richard Topgaard and Erling Björgvinsson from Malmö University that research on developing new collaborative ways of producing social media by bringing together researchers, students, grassroots media producers, artists and IT companies. When we started to talk about new and interactive ways of distributing the movie we could easily see that sharing files on sites like The Pirate Bay is a fantastic interactive distribution that already works, but still no feature has been released this way.

Since then five students studying interaction design at the School of Arts and communication (K3), Malmö University have had the distribution of Nasty Old People as one of their projects, and now the film is seeded from Malmö University computers! The students are about to write a paper on the subject; I am curious about what they will write and I look forward to reading it!Today we have at least 20 000 downloads and 18 000 SEK, (1 800 EUR). Of course this is amazing in so many ways, but when I think about it, for me the greatest part of all this, is that for the whole thing to work out we have to help each other! Someone have to seed for someone else to be able to download, and I believe people want to take part, not just consume, and this is one step in that direction. So no, I’m not afraid to offend “the system”; rather I’m very happy that it actually does work!

Keep seeding!

Hanna