If, like me, you are sick of hanging with Big Willie, and long for something fresher than even the Fresh-Prince could offer, then look no further than my own selection from the brave new world of independant internet only films..
BUSTED: The Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters. by Flex Your Rights
“Now you can make this hard or easy on yourself..” - the film reveals a number of methods that police officers use to intimidate citizens into giving up their rights.
This film is utterly chilling in a cringe-making sort of way. Its a sort of “Sliding Doors” for kids growing up in a Patriot-Act inspired police state. The concept is that just because Americans may bend the law from time to time, does not mean they have to give up their constitutional rights.
In the first scene, a mean old highway cop pulls some kids over for speeding and then, we cringe with horror as the nosy cop proceeds to violate all of their 4th Ammendment rights, and in the end busts them for posession of canabis. In the second scene we see how different things might have worked out if the kids knew and stood up for their rights. In the alternate version of the story, they get away with little more than a speeding fine.
The moral of the story is that police officers may intimidate people into not asserting their rights, but a failure to do so is to invite false-arrest and injustice.
Download this film now and give copies to all your American friends!
How Software Patents Actually Work by Gavin Hill
RMS on the perils of Software Patents…
This is a light-hearted short animated film that asks what might happen if the law changes to allow Software Patents. This may sound like a rather unlikely subject matter for an animation, which is why Gavin’s animation is so brilliant; It communicates the essential issues in under 5 minutes, without getting boring.
Software patents pose a genuine threat to the Open-Source and Free software industries. Patents deprive us of the natural ability to build on the intellectual work of our predecessors. If most software inventions were patented, then act of writing a simple commercial program would be a one-way ticket to patent court. This is because few programmers know which seemingly obvious computing concepts are actually the patented inventions of companies like IBM or Microsoft.
Download a copy now and post it on a CD to your MEP.
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