We were pleased to see Mike Masnick of Techdirt covering VODO a couple of days ago:

While some continue to insist that there’s nothing good or legal that comes from file sharing sites, many content creators who have embraced those sites have found them to be wonderful tools for distribution and promotion [...] it could be a valuable tool to indie filmmakers who recognize that obscurity is a much bigger threat to their efforts than piracy.

Like Mike, we don’t think that a donation-only model is going to cut it for our creators, so we’re working on a series of revenue models around their free-to-share content.

The comments to this article are worth a read. We want to address specifically the idea that VODO is simply a ’skin’ for The Pirate Bay or another filesharing site. It’s not. VODO emerges directly out of the STEAL THIS FILM project, which was also independent of any P2P distributor but supported by a lot of them. A thousand trackers are blooming as it gets easier every day to put one together. As an entity, VODO sits in between all those sites and services, supplying them with content that’s freely shared by creators.

We enjoy the support, in the Distribution Coalition (DISCO) of over a dozen filesharing sites and services. Some of them, like Miro, are also focused on distribution creator-shared content; others, like Vuze are full-on, funded plays. Our view is that filesharing networks of all stripes hold real potential for creators, and the hundreds of emails we’ve received over the last few days make us think that the creators themselves do, to!

Mike and others, get in touch with us if you’d like to chat more!

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