Liam Abbas

Watching a DVD in the 2000s, you couldn’t avoid seeing the now iconic “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy ad. Though it’s been parodied ever since, this public service announcement successfully drilled into the heads of a generation that piracy is theft. However, the truth about piracy is actually far more complicated. Downloading films like this is indeed a violation of intellectual property rights, and studies into the subject have confirmed that this does hurt the film industry. According to the US Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Centre, piracy costs the American film industry around $21.2 Billion a year,…

Need a friend? How about a family? Well, in Japan you can rent one. Family rental services are businesses that specialise in hiring actors to be your friend, co-worker or even a parent. For modern Japan, they have become a lucrative business model with at least 10 different companies that currently provide this service. Family rental services offer to fulfil any social need- from a simple conversation to filling out the number of your party guests to mourning with you at a funeral. One Tokyo company has found its niche renting out guests for weddings. For 20,000 yen (£127), a…

The last decade or so has seen a change in the way we view gender. There has been an increase in the number of people who feel they do not identify their own gender as male or female and instead classify themselves under the umbrella term of non-binary. The new label encompasses both trans and intersex people that have embraced an identity that simply means anything other than a binary idea of gender, meaning they can identify with more than one gender or see themselves as an entirely different third gender. The recognition of nonbinary people has been mixed, many…

Their new Hitchcockian thriller; Crimewave , which would be helmed by none other than their old collaborator Sam Raimi and would almost ruin their careers.

The British right to universal healthcare is to many a symbol of what is great about Britain, it’s hard to think of something that makes modern Britain more patriotic than the NHS. But dissatisfaction with the National Health Service is the highest it’s been in decades, with research showing that . Decades of neglect and mismanagement, exacerbated by the Covid crisis, have left the health service underfunded, short of staff and simply unequipped to deal with the realities of the county’s health care needs. We all understand the NHS has become overwhelmed, but it might surprise some just how close…

The last couple of weeks have seen the introduction of bills that have serious implications on the way democracy works in this country.

News of Russian Oligarchs dominate the headlines, but what exactly is an oligarch and why are they being sanctioned?

It’s been over two decades since George Bush’s speech that promised to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against those who were responsible for…

Until 2017 you could experience one of Disney’s strangest rides, a small slow moving dark ride in Epcot with a pro fossil fuel message.

Far more than just an advertisement, film posters are an art form in their own right and have become an iconic part of pop culture. Hollywood may currently dominate the conversation when it comes to the film poster aesthetic, but at one time many different countries had unique visions of what a movie poster could be. Perhaps the most interesting was the weird world of Polish movie posters. From the mid-50s until 1989, communist Poland saw a golden age of poster art. These pieces are vastly different from the clean, unimaginative and actor obsessed film posters of today. Polish movie…