''TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard'' is a 2013 Swedish documentary film directed and produced by Simon Klose. It focuses on the lives of the three founders of The Pirate Bay – Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm – and the Pirate Bay trial. Filming began sometime in 2008, and concluded on 28 February 2012.

Production

The film's website was launched on 28 August 2010, along with a

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campaign to raise US$25,000 to hire an editor after the Court of Appeal trial. The campaign was fully funded within three days and raised $51,424 in total. In February 2011, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee ( sv, Konstnärsnämnden) granted the project an additional 200,000 SEK (≈$30,000).

Release

The full film was released under the

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

br>BY-NC-ND
license onto The Pirate Bay, YouTube, and other BitTorrent sites. Additionally, a four-minute shorter version with certain copyright restricted content removed was released at the same time under the Creative Common
BY-NC-SA
license to allow remixing. TPB AFK premiered at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival on 8 February 2013 – opening the festival's 'Panorama Dokumente' section – coinciding with its free online release on YouTube and The Pirate Bay. On 19 February 2013, the film was broadcast on

BBC Four BBC Four is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by the BBC. It was launched on 2 March 2002

in the UK as part of the BBC's ''Storyville'' documentary series.

Reception

Peter Sunde, one of the subjects of the documentary, wrote that he has "mixed feelings about the movie and the release of it". Whilst he likes the technical side of the documentary, he has issues with some scenes and general attitude of the documentary; this includes too much focus put on the trial, too dark depiction of it, and portraying himself beyond self-recognition. Despite having such different views on the subject, he regards the director as a friend.

Censorship by Hollywood

In May 2013,

Hollywood Hollywood usually refers to: * Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California * Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States Hollywood may also refer to: Places United States * Hollywood District (disambiguation) * Hollywood, ...

studios – such as Viacom, Paramount,

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and Lionsgate – started to censor Google Search links pointing to the documentary, an action criticized by Simon Klose. In June, after the initial controversy,

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and Lionsgate sent additional bogus DMCA takedown notices to Google requesting the removal of links related to TPB AFK. In response, Simon Klose contacted

Chilling Effects Lumen, formerly Chilling Effects, is an American collaborative archive created by Wendy Seltzer and founded along with several law school clinics and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect lawful online activity from legal threats. Lum ...

, who recommended him to file a DMCA counter-notice once he had found out whether Google had taken down the links or not. Two months later, the censored links were reinstated only after public complaints made by Klose.

References

External links

Main sites

''TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard''
on

* * * – as part of BBC's ''Storyville'' TV documentary strand

Documentary online

''TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard''
on The Pirate Bay
''TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard''
on YouTube * {{Piraya Film The Pirate Bay File sharing Internet documentary films Creative Commons-licensed documentary films Open content films Kickstarter-funded documentaries Swedish documentary films 2013 films 2013 documentary films Documentary films about the Internet Documentary films about politics Films set in Sweden Films set in Cambodia Films set in Laos Works about intellectual property law Works about computer hacking 2010s Swedish films