In October of 2011, Representative Lamar S. Smith (of the great state of Texas) introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act to Congress. The bill’s aim was to bolster copyright holders in fights against those that infringe upon them, and that’s an important task. Intellectual property theft can be incredibly injurious to the victim. In fact, FSR had to cut through red tape in the fall of last year to stop a Chinese-based website from stealing its content and republishing it wholesale. Plagiarism is despicable, and stealing the hard creative work of others is too. However, SOPA is tantamount to drinking drain cleaner because your nose itches. The bill is unduly generic – granting massive powers to the government and entities who would wield it like a plaything to shut down websites for spurious reasons and to keep them down throughout what would inevitably be a drawn-out legal process. In short, for an accusation with no meat on it, some of your favorite sites could be shut down on a whim, creating both temporary and possibly permanent damage. As you can see from our masthead today, we’re in full support of the protest against SOPA (and PIPA, it’s cousin in the Senate). While we don’t know how powerful the SOPA blackout might be, we genuinely wish we could go dark as well, but it’s just not feasible for a site like ours that operates on a smile and a shoestring. Losing a day of revenue is just too much of a [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

After David Fincher’s The Social Network became such a huge hit both critically and commercially, it didn’t take long before everyone started making jokes about the copycat movies that would follow. How much money is the MySpace movie going to spend on CGI glitter? How will the Twitter movie be able to tell a satisfying story in 140 characters or less? It didn’t take a genius to figure out that anyone else trying to make a movie about an Internet startup was going to be laughed out of the box office. That’s an especially rough situation for Alex Winter, who has been trying to get a Napster movie off the ground for the last ten years. Add the fact that the idea of a Napster movie seems very passé in a post Justin Timberlake as Shawn Parker world to the fact that whatever Winter tries to do is already going to get bombarded with jokes about how he was Bill S. Preston, Esq. in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and finding funding for his rise of Napster script starts to look like an uphill battle not worth fighting. So, in that tough situation, really there’s only one course of action: turn your narrative film into a documentary. People can make documentaries about anything.

So far, the war against film piracy has had a familiar pattern. Unfortunately, it’s a pattern that leads to failure.

I don’t think so, but I’m willing to hear a good argument that proves you can be both.

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we talk with Mystery Team director Dan Eckman about piracy, hot women casting, and what the cool kids are wearing for Halloween this year.

With recent events involving fresh piracy lawsuits, and people vehemently defending their right to steal, it’s important to check out what filmmakers think about piracy. In the case of Kiowa Winans and Rhett Reese, it’s not as black and white as you’d think.

Your daily recommended allowance of random movie stuff, stories that fell through the cracks, and news you can’t use.

Your daily recommended allowance of random movie stuff, stories that fell through the cracks, and news you can’t use.

So you’ve been thinking about quitting your job at Steak N Shake? A position just opened up that might interest you!

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we avoid getting hit by a volcano. By. That. Much.

There has been a lot of chatter on the ole’ interwebs about piracy lately. Come to think of it, there is always a lot of chatter on the internet about movie piracy.

The folks at 20th Century Fox have offered up a peace offering to the internet this morning with a brand new internet-only trailer for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Also, we are once again talking piracy…

Our friends at IMDB are running a tidbit sound bite from Eli Roth proving, you guessed it, he’s still pissed off about Hostel II bombing and is still blaming piracy.

Here we go for week two of our joint feature known as “The Best Articles on the Web”. We have partnered up with some of our good friends from around the movie blogosphere to spread joy and editorial greatness. Check out the articles after the jump.