Pirate Cinema Read online

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  For Walt Disney:

  remix artist, driven weirdo, public domain enthusiast

  Acknowledgments

  The initial inspiration for this book came from the actual Pirate Cinema movement all over the world, and I thank them most sincerely for letting me rip, mix, and burn their real-world awesomeness. Thanks also to Vodo.com’s Jamie King, my go-to guy for help with the squatting bits. Simon Bradshaw was indispensable when it came to getting the legals right. Sarah Hodgson was a big help with the northerness, and Jo Roach was the all-time champ when it came to improving my dialect. As always, my mother, Roz Doctorow, was a stellar proofer and subeditor—I only wish I’d inherited more of her detail orientation.

  Thank you to the United Kingdom, my adopted country, for making me an Official British Person in 2011. Thank you to the MPs who stood up to the dreadful Digital Economy Act, especially the indefatigable Tom Watson, who defied the three-line whip from the Labour Party. A backwards thanks to the corporatist lickspittles in Parliament and the Lords whose cowardice and corruption inspired this book. You know who you are, and so do the rest of us. We won’t forget it, either. Betting against the Internet in the twenty-first century is felony stupidity, and I will personally see to it that this gross dereliction of duty dogs what’s left of your political careers, forever.

  Thanks to the copyfighters who stood up so brilliantly to SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA in 2012 and made me feel, for a moment, like some of my book was coming true.

  Finally, thanks as always to my favorite British people: my wife, Alice, and my daughter, Poesy, who put up with all manner of bad behaviour on the way to this book’s completion.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Also by Cory Doctorow

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  A STAR FINDS TRUE LOVE/A KNOCK AT THE DOOR/A FAMILY RUINED/ON THE ROAD/ALONE

  I will never forget the day my family got cut off from the Internet. I was hiding in my room as I usually did after school let out, holed up with a laptop I’d bought thirdhand and that I nursed to health with parts from here and there and a lot of cursing and sweat.

  But that day, my little lappie was humming along, and I was humming with it, because I was about to take away Scot Colford’s virginity.

  You know Scot Colford, of course. They’ve been watching him on telly and at the cinema since my mum was a girl, and he’d been dead for a year at that point. But dead or not, I was still going to take poor little Scoty’s virginity, and I was going to use Monalisa Fiore-Oglethorpe to do it.

  You probably didn’t know that Scot and Monalisa did a love scene together, did you? It was over fifty years ago, when they were both teen heartthrobs, and they were costars in a genuinely terrible straight-to-net film called No Hope, about a pair of clean-cut youngsters who fall in love despite their class differences. It was a real weeper, and the supporting appearances in roles as dad, mum, best mate, pastor, teacher, etc, were so forgettable that they could probably be used as treatment for erasing traumatic memories.

  But Scot and Monalisa, they had chemistry (and truth be told, Monalisa had geography, too—hills and valleys and that). They smoldered at each other the way only teenagers can, juicy with hormones and gagging to get their newly hairy bits into play. Adults like to pretend that sex is something that begins at eighteen, but Romeo and Juliet were, like, thirteen.

  Here’s something else about Scot and Monalisa: they both used body doubles for other roles around then (Scot didn’t want to get his knob out in a 3D production of Equus, while Monalisa was paranoid about the spots on her back and demanded a double for her role in Bikini Trouble in Little Blackpool). Those body doubles—Dan Cohen and Alana Dinova—were in another film, even dumber than Bikini Trouble, called Summer Heat. And in Summer Heat, they got their hairy bits into serious play.

  I’d known about the /No Hope/Equus/Bikini Trouble/Summer Heat situation for, like, a year, and had always thought it’d be fun to edit together a little creative virginity-losing scene between Scot and Monalisa, since they were both clearly yearning for it back then (and who knows, maybe they slipped away from their chaperones for a little hide-the-chipolata in an empty trailer!).

  But what got me into motion was the accidental discovery that both Scot and Monalisa had done another job together, ten years earlier, when they were six—an advert for a birthday-party service in which they chased each other around a suburban middle-class yard with squirt guns, faces covered in cake and ice cream. I found this lovely, lovely bit of video on a torrent tracker out of somewhere in Eastern Europe (Google Translate wouldn’t touch it because it was on the piracy list, but RogueTrans said it was written in Ukrainian, but it also couldn’t get about half the words, so who can say?).

  It was this bit of commercial toss that moved me to cut the scene. You see, now I had the missing ingredient, the thing that took my mashup from something trite and obvious to something genuinely moving—a flashback to happier, carefree times, before all the hairy bits got hairy, before the smoldering began in earnest. The fact that the commercial footage was way way down-rez from the other stuff actually made it better, because it would look like it came from an earlier era, a kind of home-film shakycam feel that I bumped up using a video-effects app I found on yet another dodgy site, this one from Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan—one of the stans, anyroad.

  So there I was, in my broom-closet of a bedroom, headphones screwed in tight against the barking of the dogs next door in the Albertsons’ flat, wrists aching from some truly epic mousing, homework alerts piling up around the edge of my screen, when the Knock came at the door.

  It was definitely a capital-K Knock, the kind of knock they Foley in for police flicks, with a lot of ominous reverb that cuts off sharply, whang, whang, whang. The thunder of authority on two legs. It even penetrated my headphones, shook all the way down to my balls with the premonition of something awful about to come. I slipped the headphones around my neck, hit the panic-button key combo that put my lappie into paranoid lockdown, unmounting the encrypted disks and rebooting into a sanitized OS that had a bunch of plausible homework assignments and some innocent messages to my mates (all randomly generated). I assumed that this would work. Hoped it would, anyway. I could edit video like a demon and follow instructions I found on the net as well as anyone, but I confess that I barely knew what all this crypto stuff was, hardly understood how computers themselves worked. Back then, anyway.

  I crept out into the hallway and peeked around the corner as my mum answered the door.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Mrs. McCauley?”

  “Yes?”
<
br />   “I’m Lawrence Foxton, a Police Community Support Officer here on the estate. I don’t think we’ve met before, have we?”

  Police Community Support Officers: a fake copper. A volunteer policeman who gets to lord his tiny, ridiculous crumb of power over his neighbors, giving orders, enforcing curfews, dragging you off to the real cops for punishment if you refuse to obey him. I knew Larry Foxton because I’d escaped his clutches any number of times, scarpering from the deserted rec with my pals before he could catch up, puffing along under his anti-stab vest and laden belt filled with Taser, pepper spray, and plastic handcuff straps.

  “I don’t think so, Mr. Foxton.” Mum had the hard tone in her voice she used when she thought me or Cora were winding her up, a no-nonsense voice that demanded that you get to the point.

  “Well, I’m sorry to have to meet you under these circumstances. I’m afraid that I’m here to notify you that your Internet access is being terminated, effective”—he made a show of looking at the faceplate of his police-issue ruggedized mobile—“now. Your address has been used to breach copyright through several acts of illegal downloading. You have been notified of these acts on two separate occasions. The penalty for a third offense is a one-year suspension of network access. You have the right to an appeal. If you choose to appeal, you must present yourself in person at the Bradford magistrates’ court in the next fourty-eight hours.” He hefted a little thermal printer clipped to his belt, tore off a strip of paper, and handed it to her. “Bring this.” His tone grew even more official and phony: “Do you understand and consent to this?” He turned his chest to face Mum, ostentatiously putting her right in the path of the CCTV in his hat brim and over his breast pocket.

  Mum sagged in the doorframe and reached her hand out to steady herself. Her knees buckled the way they did so often, ever since she’d started getting her pains and had to quit her job. “You’re joking,” she said. “You can’t be serious—”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Have a nice day.” He turned on his heel and walked away, little clicking steps like a toy dog, receding into the distance as Mum stood in the doorway, holding the curl of thermal paper, legs shaking.

  And that was how we lost our Internet.

  * * *

  “Anthony!” she called. “Anthony!” she called again.

  Dad, holed up in the bedroom, didn’t say anything.

  “Anthony!”

  “Hold on, will you? The bloody phone’s not working and I’m going to get docked—”

  She wobbled down the hall and flung open the bedroom door. “Anthony, they’ve shut off the Internet!”

  I ducked back into my room and cowered, contemplating the magnitude of the vat of shit I had just fallen into. My stupid, stupid obsession with a dead film star had just destroyed my family.

  I could hear them shouting through the thin wall. No words, just tones. Mum nearly in tears, Dad going from incomprehension to disbelief to murderous rage.

  “Trent!”

  It was like the scene in Man in the Cellar, the bowel-looseningly frightening Scot slasher film. Scot’s in the closet, and the murderer has just done in Scot’s brother and escaped from the garage where they’d trapped him, and is howling in fury as he thunders down the hallway, and Scot is in that closet, rasping breath and eyes so wide they’re nearly all whites, and the moment stretches like hot gum on a pavement—

  “Trent!”

  The door to my room banged open so hard that it sent a pile of books tumbling off my shelf. One of them bounced off my cheekbone, sending me reeling back, head cracking against the tiny, grimy window. I wrapped my head in my hands and pushed myself back into the corner.

  Dad’s big hands grabbed me. He’d been a scrapper when he was my age, a legendary fighter well known to the Bradford coppers. In the years since he’d taken accent training and got his job working the phone, he’d got a bit fat and lost half a step, but in my mind’s eye, I still only came up to his knee. He pulled my hands away from my face and pinned them at my sides and looked into my eyes.

  I’d thought he was angry, and he was, a bit, but when I looked into those eyes, I saw that what I had mistaken for anger was really terror. He was even more scared than I was. Scared that without the net, his job was gone. Scared that without the net, Mum couldn’t sign on every week and get her benefits. Without the net, my sister Cora wouldn’t be able to do her schoolwork.

  “Trent,” he said, his chest heaving. “Trent, what have you done?” There were tears in his eyes.

  I tried to find the words. We all do it, I wanted to say. You do it, I wanted to say. I had to do it, I wanted to say. But what came out, when I opened my mouth, was nothing. Dad’s hands tightened on my arms and for a moment, I was sure he was going to beat the hell out of me, really beat me, like you saw some of the other dads do on the estate. But then he let go of me and turned round and stormed out of the flat. Mum stood in the door to my room, sagging hard against the doorframe, eyes rimmed with red, mouth pulled down in sorrow and pain. I opened my mouth again, but again, no words came out.

  I was sixteen. I didn’t have the words to explain why I’d downloaded and kept downloading. Why making the film that was in my head was such an all-consuming obsession. I’d read stories of the great directors—Hitchcock, Lucas, Smith—and how they worked their arses off, ruined their health, ruined their family lives, just to get that film out of their head and onto the screen. In my mind, I was one of them, someone who had to get this bloody film out of my skull, like, I was filled with holy fire and it would burn me up if I didn’t send it somewhere.

  That had all seemed proper noble and exciting and heroic right up to the point that the fake copper turned up at the flat and took away my family’s Internet and ruined our lives. After that, it seemed like a stupid, childish, selfish whim.

  * * *

  I didn’t come home that night. I sulked around the estate, half-hoping that Mum and Dad would come find me, half-hoping they wouldn’t. I couldn’t stand the thought of facing them again. First I went and sat under the slide in the playground, where it was all stubs from spliffs and dried-out, crumbly dog turds. Then it got cold, so I went to the community center and paid my pound to get in and hid out in the back of the room, watching kids play snooker and table tennis with unseeing eyes. When they shut that down for the night, I tried to get into a couple of pubs, the kind of all-night places where they weren’t so picky about checking ID, but they weren’t keen on having obviously underage kids taking up valuable space and not ordering things, and so I ended up wandering the streets of Bradford, the ring-road where the wasted boys and girls howled at one another in a grim parody of merriment, swilling alco-pops and getting into pointless, sloppy fights.

  I’d spent my whole life in Bradford, and in broad daylight I felt like the whole city was my manor, no corner of it I didn’t know, but in the yellow streetlight and sickly moonglow, I felt like an utter stranger. A scared and very small and defenseless stranger.

  In the end, I curled up on a bench in Peel Park, hidden under a rattly newspaper, and slept for what felt like ten seconds before a PCSO woke me up with a rough shake and a bright light in my eyes and sent me back to wander the streets. It was coming on dawn then, and I had a deep chill in my bones, and a drip of snot that replaced itself on the tip of my nose every time I wiped it off on my sleeve. I felt like a proper ruin and misery-guts when I finally dragged my arse back home, stuck my key in the lock, and waited for the estate’s ancient and cantankerous network to let me into our house.

  I tiptoed through the sitting room, headed for my room and my soft and wondrous bed. I was nearly to my door when someone hissed at me from the sofa, making me jump so high I nearly fell over. I whirled and found my sister sitting there. Cora was two years younger than me, and, unlike me, she was brilliant at school, a right square. She brought home test papers covered in checkmarks and smiley faces, and her teachers often asked her to work with thick students to help them get their grades up. I had
shown her how to use my edit-suite when she was only ten, and she was nearly as good an editor as I was. Her homework videos were the stuff of legend.

  At thirteen years old, Cora had been a slightly podgy and awkward girl who dressed like a little kid in shirts that advertised her favorite little bands. But now she was fourteen, and overnight she’d turned into some kind of actual teenaged girl with round soft bits where you’d expect them, and new clothes that she and her mates made on the youth center’s sewing machines from the stuff they had in their closets. She always had some boy or another mooching around after her, spotty specimens who practically dripped hormones on her. It roused some kind of odd brotherly sentiment in me that I hadn’t realized was there. By which I mean, I wanted to pound them and tell them that I’d break their legs if they didn’t stay away from my baby sister.

  In private Cora usually treated me with a kind of big-bro reverence that she’d had when we were little kids, when I was the older one who could do no wrong. In public, of course, I wasn’t nearly cool enough to acknowledge, but that was all right, I could understand that. That morning, there was no reverence in her expression; rather, she seethed with loathing.

  “Arsehole,” she said, spitting the word out under her breath.

  “Cora—” I said, holding my hands up, my arms feeling like they were hung with lead weights. “Listen—”

  “Forget it,” she said in the same savage, hissing whisper. “I don’t care. You could have at least been smart, used a proxy, cracked someone else’s wireless.” She was right. The neighbors had changed their WiFi password and my favorite proxies had all been blocked by the Great Firewall, and I’d been too lazy to disguise my tracks. “Now what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to do my homework? I’ve got GCSEs soon; what am I supposed to do, study at the library?” Cora revised every moment she had, odd hours of the morning before the house was awake, late at night after she’d come back from babysitting. Our nearest library closed at 5:30 and was only open four days a week thanks to the latest round of budget cuts.