 Hi, my name is Simon and I'm the Director of the Pirate Bay away from Keyboard, a feature documentary about the founders of the world's largest file-sharing site. Right now it's a really exciting time. We're one month away from the Court of Appeal hearings in Stockholm, Sweden, and I'm in Southeast Asia following the story. A couple of years ago, I accidentally ran into Brokeham, one of the three founders of the Pirate Bay. After a cup of coffee, he told me how the White House had threatened the Swedish government because of his and his buddy's hobby homepage. He told me how the Pirate Bay had tried to buy an island to create a nation of their own without copyright laws. He also told me about the Pirate Bay's involvement with WikiLeaks. I was totally amazed by the stories Brokeham told me, and at that point I hadn't even met the other two founders. When I finally did meet Tiamo, Anacata and Brokeham and saw them in the same room together, I realized that the real story here is between them, within the context of the global copyright conflict. I've been following this story for almost two years now. Right now I'm sitting on over 200 hours of incredible footage. This is where I need your help. In the past I've edited myself, but with this amazing story, I want to find a great editor that can help me tell a complex story in the best possible way. The money I raise here would go to hire a professional editing studio and an editor. A lot of people keep asking me, how can you make a movie about the Pirate Bay when they're killing your own business as a filmmaker? They say that file sharing is killing creativity. Well, to me the answer is simple. I don't believe in it. I believe in finding new ways of rewarding culture. This is one such way. Help me prove them wrong. Thank you for watching. Thank you so much. It's almost exactly one year ago that I awkwardly posted this video on the American site kickstarted.com. It was the 28th of August 2010, and I say awkward because I'm a cameraman. I'm used to being behind the camera, and also I thought that when you want to fund a movie, you would just post a trailer from the film, obviously, but I was advised specifically to not post a trailer, but to film myself, be personal, and specify what the money would go to. It made me realize that much like I want to know when I'm a droting toy at buying my organic zucchini, or from some guy who grew it in his apartment window or at his farm or whatever, it makes my omelet taste a little bit better when I know who produced the product. I really think that nowadays people want to know who the people are behind the media that they consume as well. With the help of this film and some other factors, we managed to raise $51,424 in just one month. That was with the help of 1,737 backers from all over the world. Now I'm going to tell you a little bit of how we did this. As a filmmaker, a lot of energy goes into finding money for your project. Your goal, naturally, is to convince financiers that your particular project or your particular story is the world's most important film right now. For me, in the past ten years that I've been trying to produce my own documentary films, the main institutions for documentary financing have been the Swedish national broadcaster Esvete, a regional film fund, Filmiskåne, that are here today, thank you, I love you, and then the Swedish Film Institute with a considerably higher threshold. Also, if the project had any form of international potential, I would try with very mixed results to sell them to TV stations in such a broad. In 2000... Sorry guys, I'm pressing the wrong button here. So, in 2008, I stumbled on a project that I was dead sure was going to be finally easy to find financing for, and it was a film about the Pirate Bay, the world's largest and most notorious file-sharing site, and the media industry's trial against the Pirate Bay that started in 2009 and got massive international media coverage, and I was certain that this was a story that had personal drama, that had political drama, and it had implications that affected everybody all over the world in their private lives. I was certain that this would be easy to finance, so I got some help from my friend in the regional film fund here in Filmiskåne, and I got some interest from Esvete and some vague promises, but as we all know, promises don't pay any bills. So off I went to a documentary conference to find financing and look for international co-producers, and I went to Sheffield, to England, and I pitched my story to a lot of different TV commissioners, and I met a lot of industry people in the documentary film world, and I was really surprised and shocked to hear that a lot of these people had never even heard about the Pirate Bay. They never heard about the largest film distributor in the history of mankind. They didn't know about it, so a lot of people told me that you know, call us back when you have a clearer story, and the one question that everybody seemed to be asking was, why would my particular territory, my particular audience, why would they want to be interested in a documentary about Swedish hackers? So I came home with this feeling of sort of, my first pitching experience was a lukewarm one, you know, they would call us back, and I was all the time wondering, do you guys know what your kids are doing at home? Have you got any clue at all? And I was kind of slightly disappointed, but my new internet friends, the guys and girls that I was actually filming, the subjects in my story that I was talking with my camera everywhere I went for the past two years, some of them are even in this crowd, they helped me, and they told me about this new site, this crowdfunding site called Kickstarter that lets you finance your cultural projects, you know, it could be films or comics or music or anything basically, food. And the basic idea was that you offered, not ownership in the project, but you offered creative rewards. So we decided to try this out, and we launched this project, and this, sorry, I'm confused again here, this is Kickstarter, as we know, and this is our project page, when we just, when we had finished our campaign. And then the, I was advised to focus not on a short, not on a long campaign, but rather on a shorter campaign, on a 30-day campaign that is, and I was told that it's more important, rather have a short campaign and work towards a specific date that means something to your project than have a long 90-day, three-month campaign, people lose interest, you know. So we decided to go for a 30-day campaign to finish the campaign on the 28th of September, the day the Court of Appeal proceedings and the Pirate Bay trials started last year. So we had a defined date to work against. And then we decided to, also we had to come up with a number obviously, how much do we want, how much do we need, and we had really no clue at all. But when I talked to the Kickstarter people and suggested $25,000, they thought that that's possible, you know, it's fairly high at that point in time, but some other projects had pulled it through and they thought, yeah, you might happen, you know, but they warned me, you know, we don't pull any traffic to your projects, you need to take care of that yourself. Okay, so we decided for that, $25,000, we had no clue. And also, I'm just going to go through real fast. Down here on the right, you can see it says pledge $10 or more. We had our little, our financing ladder for $10, people would get a link for the finished film, which is great because that doesn't cost us anything, it's just a link. For $25, people would get a DVD, the finished film. It's basically a pre-buy. So for $60,000, they would get Finsta, my good friend and collaborator and artist who has done all the artwork for the film. They would get his t-shirt for $60, and then for $100, they would get the t-shirt and the DVD for $500, they would get all of that plus credits in the film, and for $5,000, they would get it, I would come to your personal screening or whatever and talk about my film. Nobody wanted that, of course. But anyway, after that, we put our doodle, or our banner, if you will, on the Pirate Base first page and pointed that to our Kickstarter campaign. And also, we built a blog where we posted clips from the documentary, Creative Commons licensed, and we also put a flatter button there, everybody has learned about flatter now, I hope. And then, after that, in the very same pen that you saw in the tuk-tuk ride here, from this very balcony, 5 or 6 in the morning, we launched the project. Finally, on the date, we made it, sort of. So it took around an hour or so until we got the first email. And it said, Jan C. Strickler has just financed your film with $10. And we were like, fuck, who is this Jan C. Strickler? Where is this dude? We love him. And then it took another maybe 10 minutes or so, and then email started coming in. It just went blank, blank, blank, in my inbox, and then it just went blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. And we were just sitting there on this balcony in the early morning, and we were just like, is this real? Are all these people giving us money? It was very, very bizarre. And it was an undescribable feeling. But after a couple of hours, I had to go into my mail application's preferences and change the sound from blank, blank, blank to ca-ching, ca-ching, ca-ching. So it kept saying ca-ching for around three days. And at that point, we had finally accumulated $51,424. Oh, sorry, $25,000. We had reached our goal, so to speak. And also, three days was what we had, that was the arrangement with the PowerPay guys as well, that we would take down the doodle from the PowerPay after three days. That's what they do when they do, when they promote stuff, it's usually three days. So it was a coincidence that we reached that goal. During the time that we had talked to them about having our doodle on the first page. So also, like Daniel mentioned, this is awesome, $51,000, getting $50,000 from the Internet is amazing. But the feeling of getting a response, the psychological feeling of getting, you know, big ups from 171 countries. And we had unique traffic of maybe 450,000 people was just undescribable. And I guess as a creator, you know, it means a lot to get positive feedback. You know, we got negative feedback as well. But that's almost just as encouraging, actually. So I believe there were some extraordinary circumstances to this campaign and this project that made this project more successful than say my last film would have been about South African car thieves. I think the single most important reason for our success was the secret weapon of the Pirate Bay's immense traffic. The Pirate Bay, this point last year was around the 94th or so biggest website on the Internet. It was right up there between Google, Poland and New York Times. And I guess that's quite a good example. Imagine buying New York Times first page for three days straight and you're the only banner there. So I guess that was the single biggest reason we were so successful. And I think that the second reason was the Pirate Bay's huge global community. The Pirate Bay is a user-generated site, totally dependent on their uploaders and downloaders and cedars and leeches and it's even moderated by volunteers. And despite the fact that you don't have to become a member of the Pirate Bay, you don't have to register, sorry, to download, 5 million people today are registered users at the Pirate Bay, which also is almost twice as much as it was when I started filming this project three years ago. So by generously sharing their community with us, and I say sharing, the Pirate Bay guys lent us the trust that they had built up with their community over the years. So I think the third reason for our success was the topic. I think that the Internet and the freedom of information and file sharing means a lot to a lot of people out there today. And partly I think because, of course, it affects our everyday lives all over the world. Also, I think that the Pirate Bay's fuck you attitude towards the big media corporations captured the feelings of a generation and played a big part in our success. So our recipe was traffic from a top domain, a vibrant community, and the topic of a generation. And well, to conclude, that's, you know, for an independent documentary production, these are extremely rare privileges to have. So the $51,000 we raised on this crowdfunding campaign is roughly 10% of the film budget. But what happened in this very year after the campaign, a lot of things have happened with the project. And one of the things that struck me most is the fact that traditional financiers have jumped aboard to a much larger extent than what they did before I did this campaign. And basically, when financiers see that a project already has a documented audience, it means less risk for them to back the project. So, yes, in many ways we had a bit of a special case. Still, I definitely think that people should try crowdfunding. I mean, bypassing the middlemen who don't necessarily always understand your project and pitching directly to the audience is an extremely powerful tool. And also, of course, the jigsaw puzzle of more democratic, more transparent, and more fun financing models on the Internet is just being laid out right now. So please, everybody, I encourage you guys to try it. Thank you.