Olympic Games have finished. Didn’t have time to watch any of it, although some of the opening ceremony visuals directed by Zhang Yimou were impressive. $ 150 million US balls for that though, while a large majority still lives in poverty.

Michael Phelps with 8 gold medals after ploughing through lots of water and equally explosive on the 100 m, 200m and 4X100m relay: Usain Bolt. What was most striking is the naive spontaneity he broke world records, even when he started celebrating early on the 100 m. This I liked, because it was refreshing from the usual split second races and there was now clearly an athlete who raised the game a few levels up.

With a background in traditional martial arts, I’m not tuned into the competitive side of things, as there will always be somebody or thing better at a certain area. It still is best to compete with the best in one self, so in that sense the nature of sports lies in exactly that element of play and triumph. It’s rare to still see that in any area of sport, as it’s all too much of a business now, so often the rhythm of it all AND the play feel rather programmed. Which is why seeing excellence can be an aspiring thing, it means people CAN still break the moulds.

Which brings me to the issue of intellectual property, rights, ownership and all that. When I searched for videos of Usain Bolt’s winning races, there was not one snippet of footage to be found. It was all removed if it had been posted and it turned out that NBC in the USA had bought the rights to most of these races. It does seem logical that a network paid millions for the rights and needs to recoup that through national viewers.

Yet, there seemed to be angry reactions from a certain site when our legal consultant had merely done his duty and asked a stream to be removed in the USA. They were difficult to contact, so he filed an official take down, which was rather unfortunate for the site in question, but at the same time it is common knowledge that every film, book or record is copyrighted. This is not because of psycho urges to control or own things, but simply because it’s a creation and a production that took a lot of investments to make.

There is now a whole generation of people who are taking for granted that films are also very expensive media to produce. Especially in our case as an independent, The Mindscape of Alan Moore absorbed a lot of our resources to get it to the cinematic standards of the industry and not just shoot a cowboy thing on video. So it was good to get supportive emails from numerous fans of the film who’d either purchased it or at least understood the mission impossible guerrilla filmmakers take on.

I also value the free spirit of the Internet, but am also worried that if the current trend continues with more and more people just looking at simply shot videos for entertainment and don’t take the time to see a film in the cinema or on a proper DVD, in a decade or less the real art and craft of film making will be lost to the mainstream.

And of course there are new revenue models coming up for media, but a lot of it is advertisement based, which casts doubts on the development of original ideas and stories. We’ll see, nobody can really predict what direction this culture will take, but at the moment the whole vibe on this planet is a gigantic rat race.

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