This April a hacker broke through Negativland's UMN mainframe firewall and stole the final version of Negativland's top-sacred for-internal-use-only "Mashin' of the Christ" video project. Negativland prayed that their in-house project would not make it into the hands of the unsuspecting public, but we all know how hard it can be to stop those "peer to peer" criminals from illegally sharing the property of others.

And what exactly did these hackers steal from Negativland??

"The Mashin' of the Christ" was/is Negativland's top-secret-not-for-viewing video response to the number one film in America. Negativland decrypted, downloaded and mashed up the most violent religious film ever made along with over 27 other Hollywood portrayals of Jesus to create their own vision of the last moments of Christ's life... all in four minutes and 14 seconds. Is Christianity still stupid? Is Communism still good? Negativland hoped that no one would ever find out for sure.

But that hope was dashed on Easter Sunday, 2004, when the video project was stolen from Negativland's hard drive, and then, just last week, released onto P2P networks worldwide. Negativland's friends and lawyers who had seen "The Mashin' of the Christ" had strongly advised against a public release ever occuring (the "anti-circumvention" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act says that doing this sort of decryption to make collage is illegal), but since God is said to see all secrets, only the public is left to be surprised by this unauthorized birth from Negativland. Voracious pirating of this work has spread across the Net and in the last few days high-resolution versions of "Mashin'" have even been appearing on P2P networks disguised as a complete copy of "The Passion of the Christ."

This was recommmended to me and I thought I would pass it on.