After an amazing few years permanently on the road strategizing, speaking and consulting with the never-ending pirate road show, I was recently presented with an opportunity I couldn’t pass up, and I’ve just taken on the role of Strategy Director at Syrup.

Syrup is a full service creative agency based in New York and Stockholm, with clients including Puma, Christian Dior and Bottega Veneta, responsible for some amazing work including the Hope.Act.Change campaign for Obama and the Ecomagination campaign for GE.

I’ve been consulting for Syrup on a few things since 2008, and have always been blown away by the quality of the work they produce. As Strategy Director I’ll be putting the ideas and research I’ve been doing these last few years into some fantastic projects, including all Puma’s work around the World Cup (check out this recent collaboration we did below with artist Kehinde Wiley).

The never-ending pirate road show will, of course, continue. I’ll be dividing my time between Syrup, speaking, consulting and other projects (including book two, and a new fiction project). It’s a lot of fun talking with all kinds of people and organizations about the cool things they could be doing, which is what I’ve done for the last two years. It’s going to be even better to be able to put some of those plans into action with one of the best creative shops in the business.

My gmail address, numbers etc will remain the same, but you can also get me at matt at syrupnyc.com, so please feel free to drop me a line.

Thank you for your continued support!

Over to Mr Wiley:

After a strong opening weekend at the box office, Fox are hailing Dances With Thunder-Smurfs as Hollywood’s first pirate-proof movie. TorrentFreak points to a Fox press release quoting studio rep Eden Wright who says “piracy will play a much smaller role in stealing profits from [Avatar] due to the technological hurdles it imposes”.

Avatar’s weekend take at the box office seems to support this theory. According to Variety, it took $77 million domestically and $242.5 million worldwide, the fifth best film opening of all time. 3D accounted for 58% of the gross.

Having been blown away by Avatar in 3-D, it’s hard to imagine watching it in 2-D, let alone trying to get the same experience from a crappy pirate copy filmed on a camera phone. This didn’t stop 500,000 downloads of Avatar from p2p sites over the weekend as well, but as is the situation with music, it’s not clear whether downloads are helping or hindering the box office. Hollywood went bat-shit back in April when Wolverine was leaked online a month before release, only to see it top the box office and beat the tally of the next nine best performing films combined. In recent weeks the independent film Ink also saw illegal downloads help rather than hinder the film, with its creators even thanking pirates for their help. “We don’t know exactly where this will all lead” they wrote, “but the exposure is unquestionably a positive thing.”

If 3-D continues to up box office revenues despite the pirates, it’s good news for film makers everywhere, and there’s more. While the web is disrupting the movie business, it’s also allowing filmmakers to much create deeper connections with fans. As we’ve discussed here before, stretching the narrative of a film across the web using transmedia storytelling is creating all kinds of new revenue streams for franchises large and small, while creating experiences impossible for fans to only interact with via pirate copies.

Encouraging and incorporating user-generated content into a story is another pirate-beating strategy – one we haven’t seen widely used by the big studios yet, but one that has serious potential. If you create a universe fans feel comfortable playing in, they’ll defend it. J.K Rowling discovered this when she sued the author of The Harry Potter Lexicon in 2007. Many (myself included) initially thought the legions of fan creating Potter content of their own would revolt against her for going after one of their own – as the lexicon had been put together by one of the most prominent members of the HP fan community. But they didn’t. The fans chose to defend Rowling. As a general rule she’d been extremely supportive of fan-sites and fan-fiction, and the community recognized that. She ended up winning the legal battle and keeping her fans.

The triple-threat of new tech, transmedia and new forms of collaboration is good news for creative endeavors of all kinds. It’s never been simpler to create a copy of a movie, song or almost anything else. But it’s also easier than it’s ever been to build an experience that makes piracy a moot point. Great stories are as important as ever. But now the way we put those stories out there has to be just as creative as the story we’re telling.

The reason we’re not getting the copyright reforms we deserve, the environmental policies we need or the public healthcare option most Americans want is the same: Institutional Corruption. We know this, but Lawrence Lessig‘s latest presentation does an incredible job of bringing the issue sharply into focus. The is as amazing as his presentations on copyright reform and free culture, but the issue is bigger. Take a minute and watch this. Some of the finest work from one of the world’s finest minds.

Are You Generic? launched this back in 2006, but I just stumbled across it on Wooster Collective looking for something else and thought it was worth reposting. The magazine business is breaking because everything written on that insert is true.

Chicago based choreographer Julia Rhoads has a new show inspired by The Pirate’s Dilemma. The show, Punk Yankees, focuses on how sampling and fair use questions apply to the world of dance. As Rhoads tells it:

“I had the good fortune of receiving a choreographic fellowship from the Maggie Alessee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) to support the research and initial development of Punk Yankees, which is the title of our anniversary concert. While at MANCC, I began working with the ensemble to address my research questions: What defines “fair use” in dance? Is it permissible to “borrow” choreographic devices if the movement is reinvented? If the dancers can’t execute the movement in the way it was originally intended, is there something interesting about that failure? If someone “stylistically” references a choreographer, should it be acknowledged as a derivative work, or is it what naturally occurs through dance education and lineage? Ultimately what we created was a work-in-progress that experimented with meta-theatrical devices and formal conventions to elucidate these provocative questions with transparency and humor.

“The title Punk Yankees came from some research I was doing online about piracy and art. Matt Mason, author of the book The Pirate’s Dilemma, talks about the fact that piracy and appropriation (in the sense of intellectual property) has historically been linked to the creation of new markets, which he calls a form of “punk” capitalism. He also traces the word “Yankee” to an old Dutch slang word “Janke,” meaning pirate. Ironically, Matt Mason was recently a keynote speaker at Dance/USA’s Annual Conference in Houston, TX (June 3-6), in the session “Fair Use and Piracy: How They Each Support a Sustainable Dance Field.”

Thanks for the reminder Cory!

A creative response to Lily Allen’s somewhat misguided rant against filesharing. If you don’t know about this Mike Masnick’s posts on Techdirt are the place to start.

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

Here’s the piece MSNBC did on the book and two pirate-beating brands who took the message to heart: Rachel Nasvik and Mochi Media.

Some chilling thoughts from Lessig on one way the copyright wars might end. Pirates, and to a greater extent, ad-hoc networks of all kinds, are a necessary part of the free market system – they (try to) keep governments and corporations honest. If something like Lessig describes ever happens, the idea of the pirate as freedom-fighter will be widely embraced. An i-9/11 would be devastating for the short term future of not just the internet, but liberty and democracy. On the other hand, this is the battlefield where citizens should want to have this fight, because this is the battlefield where we can win.