Pirate Cinema (16 page)

"Do I look okay?" I said.

Jem cocked his head. I thought he was going to say something else sarcastic, but he came over to me and smoothed down my collar, untucked my shirt from my trousers, did something with his fingers to my hair. "You'll do," he said. Rabid Dog and Chester were both nodding. "Proper gentleman of leisure now," Jem went on. "Don't forget that. They can smell fear. Go in there, be confident, be unafraid, be of good cheer. Listen to her, that's very important. Don't try to kiss her until you're sure she wants you to. Remember that you are both a gentleman and a gentleman of leisure. Got your whole life ahead of you, no commitments and not a worry in the world. Once she knows that, fwoar, you'll be sorted. Deffo." Jem always turned on the chirpy cheerful cockney sparrow talk when he was on a roll.

This sounded like good advice and possibly a little insulting, but I'd already had a turn at defending 26's honor and reckoned that she could probably stick up for herself anyway. And besides, I was frankly hoping to get "sorted," whatever that meant in Jem's twisted imagination. I was grateful for the advice.

It took me three tries to go into the shop, and in between the tries, I stopped and breathed deeply and told myself, "Gentleman of leisure, gentleman of leisure, gentleman of leisure." Then I squared my shoulders, re-scruffed my hair the way Jem had done, and wandered casually into the little shop.

She was bent over the desk, mohican floppy and in her eyes, staring at some kind of printed invoice or packing list, a pile of books before her on the counter. Even her profile was beautiful: dark liquid brown eyes, skin the color of light coffee, round nose, rosebud lips.

She looked up when I came in, started to say, "We're about to close --" and then raised her eyebrows, and said, "Oh!" She was clearly surprised, and I held my breath while I waited to discover if she was
pleasantly
surprised.

"You!" I said, trying hard to seem sincerely shocked, as though I'd just coincidentally wandered in. "Wow!"

"I'm surprised you're able to walk," she said.

God, I was such an idiot. She hated me. She'd seen me stupidly drunk and had decided I was a complete cock and now I'd followed her to work and she was going to think I was a stalker too, oh God, oh God, oh God, say something Trent. Gentleman of leisure. "Erm." I had had over an hour on the bus and that was all I'd come up with. Erm. "Well. Yeah. Felt rank when I got up. Better now, though. Good party, huh?"

"You looked up where I worked, didn't you?"

Ulp. Idiot, idiot, idiot. "Rumbled," I said. "I, well." Gentleman of leisure. Unafraid. Full of cheer. I pasted on a smile. "I did. Cos, you know, I drank too much last night and got stupid and that, and I wanted to come here and see you again and give it another try."

She looked at her paper. "All right, that's a
little
bit creepy, but also somewhat charming and flattering. But I'm afraid your timing is awful. Got a meeting to go to right after work, which is in --" She looked at the screen on the counter. "Ten minutes."

I felt like a balloon that's had the air let out of it. She didn't hate me, but she also didn't have time for me just then. Course she didn't. I tried not to let the crushing disappointment show, but I must have failed.

"Unless," she said, "you want to come along? It's just round the corner."

"Yes!" I said, far too quickly for a cool man of leisure, but who gave a toss? "What kind of meeting is it?"

"I think you'll enjoy it," she said. She made another mark on her paper, shoved it into the stack of books, and hopped off the stool. "Come on."

The meeting was being held just down the road, in the basement room of a Turkish restaurant, the kind of place where they had hookah pipes and apple tobacco and low cushions. 26 said, "They're a good bunch -- some of 'em are from the bookstore, others are from protest groups and free software groups and that. The sort of people who're worried that they'll get done over by the Theft of Intellectual Property Bill." She said this as though I should know what it was, and I was too cool to admit that I had no idea, so I nodded my head sagely and made enthusiastic noises.

Almost everyone there was older than us by at least ten years, and some were
really
old, fifty or sixty. Lots of the blokes were older and kind of fat with beards and black T-shirts with slogans about Linux and stuff. These beardie-weirdies were the free software lot; you could spot 'em a mile off. Then there were ancient punks with old piercings and tattoos and creaky leather jackets. And there were serious, clean-cut straights in suits and that, and then a bunch of the sort you'd expect to find round Brick Lane -- in their twenties, dressed in strange and fashionable stuff. Mostly white and Asian, and a couple of black people. It looked a little like someone had emptied out a couple night buses full of random people into the low-ceilinged basement.

Especially with all the DJ/dance party types, showing off their dance moves and tap-transferring their latest illegal remixes to one anothers' headphones. I'd always thought of music as something nice to have in a film, so I'd not paid much attention to their scene since landing up in London, but I had to admit that the things these kids could do with pop songs and computers made for some brilliant parties.

There was iced mint tea, which was
brilliant
, and someone had brought a big basket of tofu-carob biscuits, which were
revolting
, but I was hungry enough to eat three of them.

"People, people," said one of the old punks. She was very tall and thin as a skeleton, and had some kind of elaborate tentacle tattoo that wrapped around her throat and coiled round her arms and her bare legs sticking out of a loose cotton sun-dress, disappearing into her high, scuffed Docs. "Time to start, okay?" She had a Polish accent and the air of a kindly school teacher, which was funny, because she looked like a warrior queen out of a post-apocalyptic action film.

We all sat down and looked over at her. 26 looked at her with something like worship and I wondered what it would take to get her to look at
me
that way.

"I'm Annika," she said. "Thank you all for coming. We hear that TIP is going to be introduced some time in the next month, and they're going to try to get it through with practically no debate. Which means we're going to have to be
fast
if we want to get people pissed off about it."

She took out her phone and turned on its beamer and painted a page on the back of the door to the basement room. It was dense type, but parts of it had been highlighted and blown up to be readable. It was headed THEFT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY BILL and it was clear that it was some kind of boring law, written in crazy lawyer gobbledygook. I looked at the highlighted sentences: "Criminal sanctions," "commercial-scale infringement," "sentencing recommendations to be left to Business Secretary's discretion..." I tried to make sense of it, but I just couldn't. I felt stupid, especially as 26 seemed to get it right away, shaking her head and clenching her fists.

Annika gave us a minute to look at it. "This is a leaked draft, so we don't know how much of it will be in the bill when they introduce it, but it even a tiny amount of this is in the final, it's very bad. Look at this: Article 1(3) makes it a criminal offense to engage in 'commercial scale' infringement, even if you're not charging or making money. That means that anyone caught with more than five pirated films or twenty pirate songs can be sent to
prison
. And here, article 2(4), leaves the sentencing guidelines up to the discretion of the Business Secretary: she's not even
elected
, and she used to work for Warner Music, and she's been on record as saying that she wished we still had the
death penalty
so it could be used on pirates.

"And here, this is the best part, here down at the bottom in article 10(4)? This says that unless this results in a seventy percent reduction in copyright infringement in eighteen months, there's a whole new set of police powers that go into effect, including the right to 'remotely search' your computer, with 'limitation of liability for incidental loss of data or access'." The people around me hissed and looked at one another. I didn't know what the hell it meant.

26 noticed my puzzlement. She pinched my cheek. "Thicko," she said. "It means that they have the right to hack your computer over the net, search your drive, and there's no penalty if they get it wrong, mess up your data, invade your privacy, whatever."

I shook my head. "That's the daftest thing --"

Everyone was talking at once. Annika held up her hands for silence. "Please, please. Yes, this is terrible. This stupid clause, this eighteen months business, it's been in every new copyright bill for a decade, right? Every time, they say, 'If these new penalties don't work, we're going to bring in even worse ones. We don't want to, of course, heavens no, who would want to be able to put people who hurt your business in jail? What corporate lobby would ever want to be able to act as police, judge and executioner? Oh no. But if this plan doesn't work, we'll just
have to
do it. Le sigh.' It's so much rubbish. But Parliament has been giving EMI and Warner and Sony and Universal so much power for so long, they've got so used to going to parties with pop-stars and getting their kiddies into the VIP screenings and behind the rope at big concerts that they don't even think about it. They just get out the rubber-stamp and vote for it.

"This time, we want to stop it. I think the time is right. People are sick to death of the piracy wars. Everyone knows someone who's been disconnected because someone in their house was accused of file-sharing. Some families are ruined by this -- lose their jobs, kids fail at school --" I jolted like I'd been stuck with a tazer. 26 looked quizzically at me, but I was a million miles away, thinking of my mum and dad and poor Cora, and all the time that'd gone by without my contacting them. I knew that they were still trying to get in touch, I couldn't help but see and flinch away from the e-mails they sent me from the library or a neighbor's house. But every day that went past without my replying made it harder for me to consider replying the next day. She'd said "ruined families" and I realized that yes, that's what I'd done: I'd ruined my family.

Annika was still talking and I squeezed my eyes shut to try to make the tears that had sprung up go back inside so that I wouldn't humiliate myself in front of 26. And honestly, it was also so that I could squeeze away the enormous and terrible feeling I got when I thought about my family. I could hear my pulse in my ears and my hands were shaking.

"Last time, every MP in the country got a visit from twenty constituents about the bill. They still voted for it. Of course they did, they were fully whipped."

26 leaned over and whispered, "That means their parties made them vote yes." Like she was explaining things to an idiot, I suppose, but I
was
an idiot about this stuff. And when she whispered in my ear, her hot breath tickled the hairs there and gave me an instant stiffie that I had to cross my legs to hide.

"This time, we want to get one hundred constituents to request meetings with their MPs. Ten a day, every day leading up to the vote. It's a big number: six hundred and fifty MPs, 6500 activists. But we're talking about putting kids in
jail
here. I think that this will wake up even the complacent zombies who say, 'It's just the same as stealing, right?'"

Lots of people had their hands up. Annika started to call on them. Everyone had ideas about how to get normal people to show up at their MPs' surgeries with pitchforks and torches, demanding justice. I wished I had an idea, too, something that would make me seem like less of a total noob in front of 26. Then I had one, and I shot my arm straight up.

Annika called on me. I suddenly felt shy and red-faced, but I made myself talk. "So, like, when I went to copyright class at school, they told us that everyone is a copyright owner, right? Like, as soon as you write it down or save it to your hard drive or whatever, it's yours for your life and seventy years, right? So I figure, we're all copyright owners, so we could go after everyone who takes our copyrights. Like, if a film company gets your graffiti in a shot, or if an MP puts your e-mail on her website, or whatever. So what if we sue them all? What if we put
them
in jail?"

Annika started shaking her head half-way through this. "I know that sounds like a good idea, but I'm afraid it won't work. The way the law is written, you have to show 'meaningful commercial potential' before you can ask for criminal prosecution. And in order to sue for damages, you need to be able to spend more on solicitors than they are: the law is written so that rich and powerful people can use it, but poor people and artists can't. A record company can use it to put you in jail for downloading too many songs, but if you're a performer whose record company owes you money, you can't use it to put some thieving exec in prison. They're evil, but they're not stupid: when they buy a law, they make damn sure it can't be used against them."