Day 26 - 7/18/21 - Sun.
- mainemoviepirate
- Jul 18
- 5 min read
Actual Journal Entry:
“Good night’s Sleep. The brand-new sheets might have helped. Didn’t struggle with it all night. It was like Christmas at the SHU. My first prison pen is about out of ink; it will be dead any second. I thought about trying to keep it as a keepsake. Is that too much like a hoarder? Maybe I’ll toss it on the breakfast tray for disposal. Thankfully, I have five more SHU Pens. Speaking of Breakfast:
BREAKFAST: Standard with a couple more bonuses: three milks and three blueberry cakes. Proves it is Christmas in the SHU! Of course, the milks are past their due dates. Probably the cake is old too. Not being negative, just factual. I ate the cereal because of the Tuna fish dinner. I was starving and ate an entire blueberry cake.
Going to get a lot of writing done today. I’m confident of it. Finish first draft of The Man Who Loved to Die, then tackle Outer Justice. It’s been four days since I heard the antics of the ‘Hey Shorty’ Guy. Maybe he got moved to a different row or taken to the Psych Ward. It was right after the Psych Doctor came to my door, maybe he was doing the rounds, that I noticed no more ‘Hey Shorty’ ruckus. I can’t imagine the Psych Ward would be any better. Maybe they’ll drug him up or at least strap him down. He would be right at home with all the banging and screaming. Conjecture World. Move on to more productive stuff.
PDFU Idea: When I jam up the sites, the one I’m going to try to get to 400 pages first is PDFU. I think it has more universal appeal, already does very well traffic-wise, and the opportunities are endless. It will be a lot of movie watching and review writing. Might be better if I get out in the winter. Either way, it can be done. I’ll try to meet the goal of three reviews a day; I’ll sky past 400 pages in three or four months. Doable. Also, as it increases the number of pages, I should see revenue rise. In theory, anyway. It will be passive income once it’s done. Make it work. Also, pursue the PDFU Network: put together twelve Public Domain movies, produce original sh*t for in between each film, and then go live on YouTube. Repeat. Revamp Format Watch. VHS Collector would help. Is there a DVD and BLURAY Collector Site?
BRUNCH: Two hardboiled eggs, two pancakes, potato wedge corners, Orange. Ate all but saved an egg and orange. The pancake thing still amazes me; I hope I can share it with T. someday.
Worked on The Man Who Loved to Die. I am wondering if it’s too long, too repetitive, too stupid. Hmm, just a first draft; rewrite later or just let it be DOA. It was good practice and fun to write. Today is dragging like crazy. I hope tomorrow I find out when I’m getting out. I think, like the “Hey Shorty” Guy, I’ve had enough. Hopefully, Camp life will flow faster time-wise. At least, I’ll have email. (Note: Not so fast…the Prosecution had a long reach.)
Did a 3-2 count workout, shower, now waiting for supper. What an experience in here. I don't know how people who are in a place like this for twenty or thirty years cope. I’m sure the camp will be better, just hope I can recreate the writing conditions. I might be writing more now because I am not spending time thinking of a way to get out of or delay having to report to Jail. It seemed so pointless to write back then except for the blog, etc. Well, I just hope this productivity continues.
SUPPER: Three meatballs, noodles, a little gravy, green beans, bread. I ate it all. Actually devoured it, probably out of boredom.
I am fighting the urge to change the last line of my Shadows poem. Think I’ll let it stand; no need to hit them over the head with it. Let the reader think what they want and draw their own interpretations. Day nearly over. First month is nearly over—crazy. Only fifty-nine more months to go!”
Notes for Day 26 (Four Years Later)
I want to talk about PDFU. It was a site that I started in 2017/2018 while my investigation was going on. You see, before the investigation started, I came to realize that I was not only decent at creating websites but I really enjoyed doing it. And I never had any formal training. It’s about creating something, and by selling movies, I was in my element. Since I’ve loved movies and TV all my life. I had already created a sister site to FindRareDVDS called LostMoviesFound. It was my experimental site. Yes, I sold rare movies I believed to be orphan works, but I also used a more flexible platform where I could create rich, SEO-tweaked pages, one for each title. Eventually, the traffic really took off for LMF.
Flash forward to 2017, when the feds seized LMF but didn’t charge me. It made me angry. I just wanted to get into this copyright debate and deal with it, win or lose. Why the delay, after delay? It made no sense. Also, I missed working on building LMF!
I sold approximately 200 titles on LMF. Side revenue from Adwords and referrals was growing, and I started to think about what if I had a site with 2,000 pages, or 20,000, or… you get the idea. The revenue I was making selling Orphan Works on DVD would have been dwarfed if I had continued to scale the site and maximize the monetization.
Since a high percentage of the movies I sold were available for FREE on YouTube, I basically centered each page around an embedded link of the FULL movie. I then jammed each one up with behind-the-scenes stories and reviews, thus recreating LMF without actually selling anything. And since I knew they were watching everything I did, I waited for them to seize that site as well.
That is the origin story of PDFU, which technically stands for ‘Public Domain Fair Use,’ but in my head, those letters stood for ‘Police Department, Fuck You.’
What many people might not understand is that the federal government never seized the PDFU domain when I was arraigned, even though they were very aware of its existence. Because it technically didn't sell anything, it fell into a blind spot for them. It seemed their motivation was never about genuinely stopping the "piracy" of these movies—which were, in many cases, already freely available—but rather about prosecuting me for my specific perceived "crimes" related to my previous activities. This experience only solidified my conviction that the focus was on me, not on a broader legal principle, which is why my fight for a better, clearer copyright law continues. If I ever decide to own businesses again after my release, I may relaunch PDFU. We'll see what happens.
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