This Thursday, I'll introduce director Kirby Dick and his movie "This Film is Not Yet Rated" at a free screening at USC. The screening is sponsored by the USC Free Culture club, a campus organization dedicated to promoting liberty, openness, and access to information. — Read the rest

Prior to 1976, the FDA did not regulate medical implants, and so shoddy and even deadly devices proliferated, inserted into Americans' body.

Warner Bros has sued talent agency Innovative Artists for running an internal-use Google Drive folder that let its clients and staff review movies in the course of their duties. They say the company ripped "screeners" (DVDs sent for review purposes) and put them on the server, whence they leaked onto torrent sites.

In this 2000 clip from a presentation at the Paley Center, South Park co-creator Matt Stone discusses his experience with the MPAA's ratings board, and explains how, as an independent, he found himself playing a kind of high-priced censorship guessing game with the board, who wouldn't tell him which scenes to change in order to go from an NC17 to an R rating. — Read the rest

Bully is a documentary on bullying that follows the lives of bullied teenagers. By all accounts, it is a brilliant and important film, the sort of thing that young people should see. Except that they won't, because the MPAA's secretive, unaccountable ratings board has given it an R rating for "language." — Read the rest

Documentary film-maker Kirby Dick ("This Film is Not Yet Rated") has just released his latest doc, "Outrage," about anti-gay politicians who are secretly gay. These are the twisted lawmakers who campaign against gay rights in public, but who are, in fact, gay (and who generally enjoy the rights they're publicly against, thanks to their power and privilege). — Read the rest

Documentary film-makers are often hobbled by copyright — the insurers and studios won't let them release their movies until every single copyrighted component is licensed, no matter that they're clearly legal fair use. American University's Center for Social Media released the Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use tries to appress this by helping insurers and filmmakers understand what is, and isn't fair use. — Read the rest

The author of ForestBlog, a blogging tool, has discovered that the MPAA was using his code in violation of his license. He gives the code away for free, but requires that users link back to his site and keep his name on the software. — Read the rest

During the Q&A at last night's screening of Kirby Dick's "This Film is Not Yet Rated," Dick recounted the story of how his film was unlawfully duplicated by the MPAA's ratings board. He submitted one copy of his movie to the MPAA, extracting a promise that no more copies would be made — the MPAA's own anti-piracy materials describe making a single unauthorized duplication as an act of piracy. — Read the rest

Reminder: tonight I'll introduce Kirby Dick and a screening of his movie, "This Film is Not Yet Rated" at the University of Southern California. The show is sponsored by the USC Free Culture club, and I can't wait.

"This Film…" was the best documentary I saw this year. — Read the rest

I just saw "This Film is Not Yet Rated" and boy, is it a fantastic piece of work. As you've no doubt heard, TFINYR is a documentary about the MPAA's censorious ratings system, whereby a secret group of "parents" meet to determine whether a given film is safe for kids to see. — Read the rest