You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t stage an elaborate bullion heist in Turin using Mini Coopers. Downloading an illegal copy of X-Men: The Last Stand? You may as well be trying to steal the fucking Crown Jewels, you monster.
Against a world defined by the black & white morality of that ad and the may like it, Cory Doctorow’s Pirate Cinema presents the shades of grey in an entertaining Orwellian Oliver Twist of a tale.
Pirate Cinema is a polemic on the very definition of creativity in a copyright-weighted environment. Is there such a thing as an original thought, or have we all just been playing with one another’s Lego bricks in creating masterpieces of film and literature? Is the act of mashing up or re-editing existing films any less creative than filming one from scratch? They’re thought-provoking questions, aggressively prodded by the novel’s protagonist; a teenager whose entire life is based in open sourced entertainment.
After illegally downloading one too many movies results in his (and his family’s) Internet being cut off by the powers that be, 16 year old Trent McCauley runs away from his Bradford home to London. Without a penny to his name and nowhere to live, Trent miraculously avoids death, drug-addiction, and doorways, by falling in with a crowd of crafty homeless folk. Not the polystyrene cup wielding unfortunates you see with their dogs and chest infections, but an altogether more happy-go-lucky bunch. Digital Dickensians. Through them he is connected to a basement-level movement protesting the increasing constrictions being put on online freedom of expression.
Doctorow’s cheery depiction of homelessness and a no-strings attached life is as much a romanticised ideal as Trent’s hope for a world where creativity comes without constraint, and it’s best to look beyond the unreachable irritating coolness of our protagonist’s laissez-fair chums and more at Doctorow’s impressive coding of the world around them.
The UK feels like it’s on the brink of dystopia – one angry caps-locked email away from a cyberspace 1984 – and yet it’s plain to see that this is our own soggy country, just one step into the future. It’s an uncomfortably close vision. A Britain soaked by Wi-Fi signals as much as rain, and an Orwellian eye on the internet that seems almost tame in comparison to the recent PRISM intel gathering revelations. All it’s lacking is the Google Glass beneath the anti-mosquito laser hats.
It’s either blindingly fortuitous timing, or proof of Cory Doctorow’s uncanny prescience, but Pirate Cinema couldn’t be released at a more appropriate time, as the storm over Internet rights and privacy rages at close to Category 5 levels of user fury. More than a timely story, it’s also a throughly entertaining summer read. So long as you can tear yourself away from your computer.
Published on Friday 14 June 2013 by Titan Books.
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