The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Friday October 6 2006
In the article below we referred to a piece of programming by "self-confessed Asperger's case" Bram Cohen. The phrase was an unfortunate departure from the spirit of the Guardian's guidelines on references to such conditions.
Remember the Napster wars that undermined the music industry? All that was merely a prelude. The same thing is currently happening again, this time with television and film. And half a million people have already watched a smash-hit documentary telling you how it's gonna be - even though that film isn't being shown in a single cinema, and hasn't been broadcast on TV.
StealThisFilm (Part 1) tells the story of The Pirate Bay, one of the web's most popular peer-to-peer network sites. Visit it right now and you will be able to download not only StealThisFilm itself, but Thank You for Smoking, The Da Vinci Code, Mission Impossible III or any of the other 150,000 films and TV programmes listed.
You could do this before, of course, with networks such as Kazaa and Napster, but to download a file of movie proportions would have taken at least a day. That changed with a clever piece of programming by self-confessed Asperger's-case Bram Cohen. Called the BitTorrent protocol, it meant that files could be broken into little pieces before being shared. As a result, sites such as The Pirate Bay could deliver you that illegal download in just an hour or two.
Initially, these sites acted primarily as a way to distribute their free alternatives to mainstream software such as Microsoft Office. Soon, however, people were using the sites to pass around digitised porn, TV and film and by January 2005, Wired Magazine announced that Cohen's software had the potential to turn the internet into a "universal TiVo" (the US equivalent of SkyPlus). The prediction came true, and today The Pirate Bay is the 500th most popular site on the net despite - or perhaps because of - attempts by the US and Swedish governments to have it shut down.
This story is told in StealThisFilm (Part 1), at heart a traditionally-structured "talking heads" documentary that features interviews with key players from The Pirate Bay, its mother organisation Piratbyrån, and its political offshoot The Pirate Party. More amusing stylings kick in, however, whenever the film-makers start practising what they preach. They identify themselves not as individuals but "the League of Noble Peers", sample freely from existing movies, adverts and documentaries and deploy semi-subliminal flash quotes that attack Hollywood for profiteering and creating a "media proletariat". But what does it all add up to: a radical gesture or just a display of childishness?
"The main point to get hold of is that the days of selling units of media at a fixed price are numbered," says the voice of the LoNP (by email). "The same combination of factors - distributed networks and digital reproduction - that seems likely to put paid to Hollywood in the medium term also seems likely to produce a new industry of small(er) producers making productions more cheaply and efficiently with significantly less grandeur and pomp. We are not Marxists, but we do think this is rather inevitable, and we don't think that is a bad thing, even if we haven't a crystal ball to see exactly how things will shake down."
Join the revolution by downloading StealThisFilm (Part 1) from www.piratebay.org. And if you really like it, donate some cash. The League of Noble Peers need £5,000 to make Part 2. Well, it's cheaper than Brad Pitt.