Well, I didn't know that you could actually do this, but sending trackbacks to your own articles works just fine (and lets you know on an article like this that there is an update) ... I need to start doing that more, as I find myself going back to the same topic frequently.

Just saw another trackback appear to this article looking at the Ebay sale of the rights of "Alvarez & Cruz" and figure I should update people. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to publishing B ... the deal fell through. The filmmaker Vince Lozano reports, "We have bad news...Girl and a Gun films only could come up with part of the money. So we decided to move on. We still believe Ebay is a viable option for selling independent films if it's properly promoted. The good news is we have interest from another company. I guess the moral to the story is if you don't have the money don't make a bid."

I linked yesterday to a story Peter Broderick wrote for DGA Magazine on distribution options back in January -- it's a great primer on many of the issues related to decisions facing independent filmmakers on the business end. It also makes the argument that "filmmakers may be better off making other types of video deals [than typical industry deals]." As prep for a discussion I'm having with the guerilla film marketing class at the UCF Film School tommorrow, I wanted to start outlining some of those issues on self-distribution of DVDs as a filmmaker.

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Brian Flemming is in Nashville today to conduct a Q&A following a screening of "Nothing So Strange" at Vanderbilt (more details.) Similarly, I didn't mention that when Brian Brooks of the indieWIRE team was down at the Florida Film Festival he tooks some photos for iPop (where you can see what some of the Florida gang look like.)

Avoiding the side-issues of Bannedmusic.org's efforts, they present one of the most concise formulas yet for making BitTorrent downloads more of a no brainer -- a self-installing copy of BitTorrent with the torrent file, wrapped in a Nullsoft Installer (they even provide a wrapping script.) While this only works on Windows machines, it installs BitTorrent (so in the future people can just download the torrent file, which seems a slight improvement over Blizzard's approach.) They also included a link to Azureus, a Java library for building BitTorrent applications.

Speaking of SXSW, Glenn Otis Brown posted about the panel he hosted there on Creative Commons and filmmaking, especially showcasing some of the efforts of David Ball (a first time filmmaker) and his Fourthwall Films, who's decided to use CC rather than traditional distribution and why he hopes people will remix his film. Ball wants to "seed a movement" where the filmmaker and the audience are more closely linked.

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The concept of "service deals" for independent filmmakers is an emerging one in the indie film space, one that generates criticism from some and talk of new paradigms from others. These service deals used be the last resort for filmmakers who couldn't find traditional acquisition, but that business model is changing, and Rania Richardson wrote a great article for us in indieWIRE looking at that in depth (after the topic was part of the buzz surrounding the Florida Film Festival and SXSW.)

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Given that I've written about how BitTorrent could work with transactions, it probably isn't surprising that I've been thinking about how the concept of broadcatching (learn more) might support online video distribution that looked like "made for Internet television". We've tried "cybercasting festivals" and "live Internet shows" and all of them suffered from the expense of the peaks of demand. While broadcatching optimizes away those peaks (turning them into the least expensive phase of distributing the video), it leaves the problems of archiving older materials as the new cost problem. Does this mean that the best new "net television" business model might be, "free when it's new, but you pay for archives?"

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Evan Prodromou of Wikitravel has become my favorite "cc-licenses crackpot" for a discussion he started in that same list yesterday. He raised some questions about the Creative Commons efforts that have troubled me as well -- that on some level the mark has come to mean so many different things under so many different licenses that the concept fragments into tax-code-like complexity. I've had similar reactions, wishing that a CC mark meant I was free to use, when in fact in many cases you still need to contact the rights holder anyway (just as you would under traditional copyright.)

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Been up to my armpits in RSS today, as we quietly launched the first phase of a multi-phase new contextual system for indieWIRE. The first slice today launched over 330 RSS feeds -- a format we've been quietly using for over a year -- off of the first chunk of that context database: films and distributors that we've tracked in our box office data (nearly a year worth's of data now.) That means if you want an RSS feed just for Sony Pictures Classics, or IFC Films, or "The Passion of the Christ", or "Latter Days" ... we've got it. We'll follow this up closely by RSS feeds for our special coverage sections and every film festival we've written about before really starting to educate the indieWIRE audience what they can do with all this. By that point we'll be up over 600 feeds, and all that is just the tip of the iceberg.

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On the surface, the ideas of micropayments and download swarming don't seem immediately compatible -- micropayments seem most effective for small fees, and download swarming encourages a rushing to the tipping point of efficiency that micropayments seem like a barrier in achieving. From a video standpoint, though, they are both solutions to bandwidth cost issues that prevent more Internet publishing of "big media objects". The relatively trivial technical issues to deploy a BitTorrent + BitPass combo, however, belies the real puzzle underneath -- how the "ethos" of the BitTorrent community interacts with the model.

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As I talk to more and more people about BitTorrent+RSS, I'm frequently asked to provide some URLs to get people up to speed. I've found I've narrowed down the "here's the scoop" email to five links (which it occured to me I may as well post to the blog and, in the process, condense down to one URL!)

(1) Theory.org's Bit Torrent FAQ Wiki

(2) "Experimenting with BitTorrent and RSS 2.0" by Andrew Grumet

(3) Wired's "Speed Meets Feed in Download Tool"

(4) "BitTorrent & RSS Video Feeds" at banjax blog

(5) Ernest Miller's writings on BitTorrent

I hardly thought it was my most interesting blog entry, but the story turned out to be more interesting and more fiercely independent that I imagined. Yes, filmmakers sold the global rights to their film on eBay -- but the more interesting aspect is who bought it and why.

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Andrew Grumet's idea for BitTorrent + RSS broadcatching that I wrote about on Monday has produced the first working tool -- one that ties into Radio Userland's news aggregator. Extremely beta, but the beginning of an interesting experiment.

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Today I moderated the Florida Film Festival panel on "NextArt", the two-year-old sidebar on new media and "entertainment of the future" (cue the sci fi music). We spent most of our time talking about play as the natural creation process. On the panel were ILL Clan founders Frank Dellario and Paul Marino ("infamous" filmmakers of the machinima variety), as well as Toy Symphony creators (and M.I.T. Media Lab developers) Tod Machover and Tristan Jehan, plus Lisa Delgado (who writes for Wired and RES).

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The distribution panel at the Florida Film Festival was particularly interesting this year, going well beyond the typical "how do I get my film acquired" questions & answers. Bob Berney (Newmarket Films), Tom Prassis (Sony Picture Classics), Richard Shamban (Fox Searchlight) and T.C. Rice (Manhattan Pictures) were warmed up by veteren Dick Morris' (Morris Projects) framing of the conversation on how independent distribution has changed since the '80s -- and the intimate atmosphere of Enzian encouraged tounges to wag.

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Amused but uninspired by a Wired article about viral propogation through blogs and HP's Blog Epidemic Analyzer, Stephen VanDyke whipped up a little info-graphic about how news travels on the Internet. Leave it to MetaTalk to be where I find a little gem like this.

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The "Fair Use" claims that didn't seem to influence a San Fransisco judge in the DVD X Copy case rise from the dead to muster up another convincing argument, this time in an unusual C|Net article exploring the legalities of DVD to Pocket PC 1.0 developed by an Amsterdam company that's carefully watching the evolution of the legal issues in the U.S. The application is designed to allow you to copy a DVD onto a 128MB or 256MB memory card by highly compressing the results. CEO of Makayama Software Vincent Verweij argues that his software is "a textbook example of fair use."

Carl Diorio in Variety says that Newmarket "could be termed the department of missed opportunities" for failing to put more money into (and thus gaining more control over the revenues of) "The Passion of the Christ" and "Monster", criticizing them for not "raking in the bucks" the way they could have.

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So, somehow, Google has already spidered this blog that I haven't even made public yet, spidered and slurped in on Friday. How the heck did that happen, I ask myself?

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BitTorrent (a peer-to-peer download swarming system) might be primarily about music, and RSS might be primarily about text, but the combination of the two raise interesting questions for distributed video (thanks Cinema Minima for the newest developments.) Andrew Grumet (who's previous work includes an interesting RSS+Tivo hack and a RSSTV proposal) first blogged about the concept in December ("Given its strengths, BitTorrent will probably be the killer app for dealing with RSS enclosures when they catch on") but has now started to blog about practical implementation issues. Ernest Miller is calling it broadcatching. What's this got to do with video?

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Everyone complains about spam, but the data also shows that spam is now up to 62% of all email messages on the Internet. Personally, I'm up to 6,000 spams on a typical day, a nearly crippling level even with multiple filters and scanners dealing with 70% of it. That's why claims of 99%+ accuracy from the new open source solutions has us experimenting with a new potential solution for our own servers.

I've never heard of "Alvarez & Cruz", but you can bid on the global film rights on eBay.

When Eugene writes that we had "another installment in an occasional indieWIRE office discussion about the definition of independent film" when discussing whether or not "The Passion of the Christ" should be included in our indieWIRE:BOT tracking of independent and speciality films, he's hinting at one of the more interesting "What is Indie?" discussions we've had as a staff in a long time (something that started last week, even.) When you apply the checklist of "indie film traits" against "The Passion" it meets more of them than the average Miramax or Sony Picture Classics release, even though something feels totally different about the scale.

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Creative Commons' new search engine is an interesting experiment, allowing a refining search across CC licensed content. I thought, "What a great way to find pieces to collaborate with ... I wonder if this is even a good clipart library?" The results that I found suggest that it might be startlingly good for that -- but is everything marked as "public domain" by a CC license really as public domain as certified? Maybe not ...

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The Associated Press story focuses on blogging ("Study: Blogging Still Infrequent") and reports that between 2% and 7% of U.S. Internet users keep a blog (and 11% have read a blog.) But the story touches on only part of the big study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project on content creation online (download the full report in PDF format.) The headline that Pew was pushing (and that seems far more interesting) is that 44% of U.S. Internet users have contributed content of some type to the Internet.

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While I stand by my previous arguments about the general lack of clear argument from the "Grey Tuesday" protest, some interesting insight from the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that EMI probably doesn't even have a valid sound recording copyright claim (since sound recordings before 1972 don't benefit from Federal protection, just common law.)