News

How many web users are currently being sued for alleged online copyright infringement in the Us? The folk at TorrentFreak, who have been obsessively logging these cases, claim 200,000 BitTorrent users are now involved in some stage of lawsuit, and claim settling with a relatively small fee on a large number of cases is fast becoming a way that rightsholders can profit from piracy.

Nearly all the 201,828 cases have been filed against BitTorrent users who allegedly shared music online, with a small number using eD2k. Once lawyers for the rightsholders have identified individuals, they generally offer to settle for a typical penalty of $2,500 which means no further legal costs or risking larger $150,000 infringement fines. TorrentFreak claims that many of the people targeted by the lawsuits aren't the actual infringers but the person who pays for the connection; facing a massive fine and a long case, they opt to pay a...

With 700,000 downloads in less than a month, a neo-noir thriller by newcomer Justin Eugene Evans shoots down the standard distribution model in favor of video-sharing site Vodo.

For director Justin Eugene Evans, making the movie was the easy part. Finding somewhere to show his low-budget tale of Vietnam-era espionage was far more complicated. Even with Oscar-nominated star James Cromwell, (Babe, L.A. Confidential) and the buzz-generating blitz of 39 film festivals, the filmmakers for A Lonely Place for Dying struggled to lock in a distribution deal. "We were approached by independent distributors and just about every top sales agent and rep in Los Angeles," says Evans, but the deals, he claims, were so lopsided in favor of the distributor, he and his investors wouldn't make a dime.

So he turned to an unlikely ally in mainstream Hollywood: the legally murky world of peer-to-peer file sharing, partnering with Vodo, a free video-sharing...

Filmmaker Justin Eugene Evans forwarded me news that an extension of Section 181, the film production tax break, was included in the bill signed by President Obama today. Here, reprinted with permission, is an email containing the news.

Dear Film Professionals -

Section 181 has finally been renewed! The new Tax Bill was signed into law by President Obama earlier today. The tax law includes Section 744, which includes language that replaces IRC Section 181′s expiration date of December 31, 2009 with December 31, 2011.

Here is what this means:

1.) Any money spent on qualifying domestic film production* in 2010 now qualifies for the Section 181 tax write-off.

2.) Any money spent on qualifying domestic film production* in 2011 will also qualify for the Section 181 tax write-off.

3.) There is no gap in Section 181 protection…which means all the fear and worry that someone might have begun a project in 2009, somehow didn’t get the financing in place and investors invested in...