Pirate Cinema (38 page)

He shrugged, and 26's mum said, "Well, that's politics for you. There's plenty that the other side can do if they don't care about being able to repeat the trick. Call in your favors, tell a bunch of whoppers about how the sky will fall if you don't get your way, smear your opposition, arm-twist the MPs. Problem is, you can only do this so much before you run out of political capital. I mean, you can only declare that art is about to die so many times before people notice that it has conspicuously failed to die." I loved it when 26's mum talked like this. She'd been in government for years before quitting to be some kind of consultant -- she'd even been a junior minister for a brief time, but she'd resigned over something her party had done, said she was through with being political forever. As if! When she talked politics, it was like she was sketching out the dark secrets of the world's inner workings. "I think the problem is that this lot doesn't really have a strategy. I can't imagine that most of them dream that they're going to reduce the amount of copying going on in the world, but there are enough people convinced that they
should
be able to. So they go on making these bizarre laws, then not having any idea how to turn them into money once they've got them. How many lawsuits did you say they'd had, dear?" She turned to 26, who was stuffing her mouth with slices of mango drowned in thick homemade yogurt. 26 rolled her eyes and pointed at me while she chewed.

"Eight hundred thousand in the US; two hundred and fifty thousand in the UK." I'd been revising on all the facts and figures of the copyright wars, reading the FAQs from all the pressure groups like Open Rights Group and Electronic Frontier Foundation. I could reel them off like my date of birth and the timecode for the juiciest rude words in Scot Colford films.

She sucked air over her teeth. "Fantastic," she said. "Insane. This lot are like a dog that finally catches the car it's chasing. They've got the Internet, it's clear that they can get practically any law or regulation passed that they want. But having won the battle, they have no idea what to do next. They keep on ordering the world to behave itself, and then giving it a thump when it doesn't mend its ways. What a bunch of utter prats."

"But they keep on beating us," I said.

26 pinched my leg under the table, hard. She'd finally swallowed her mouthful. "Stop with the defeat talk. Christ on a bike, you're not going to get up in front of all those people in sack-cloth and say 'doomed doomed we're all doomed,' are you?"

"Course not." I swallowed. "It's just so easy to lose heart sometimes --"

"Be of stout heart and fear not, young sir, for you have right on your side," her dad said, declaiming like a Shakespearean. 26 rolled her eyes again. He thumbed his nose at her. "It's true, you know. For all that these are big and powerful interests, they are, at heart
wrong
. Take it from someone who's spent a lot of time in front of a lot of juries: being right counts. It's not an automatic win, but it's not nothing, either."

They all nodded as though that settled it, and I thought of how nice it must be to be someone like that -- someone who could simply make up his mind that he was right, the world was wrong, and fearlessly stride forth to fix things. That was the crazy thing about 26's family: they believed that they could actually change things. They believed
I
could change things. I only wished that I believed it, too.

There was a time when I worked in bookstores, and people would wander in, looking for a book. It was my job to ascertain their literary preferences, think about the stock on hand, and make a love-match between the reader and the book. I like to think I was pretty good at it. It's a noble trade.

Allow me to demonstrate. You have now read several hundred pages' worth of a novel called
Pirate Cinema
, by some hack called Cory Doctorow. On this basis, I'm going to recommend that you buy a copy, since you're clearly enjoying it:

USA:

Amazon Kindle
(DRM-free)
Barnes and Noble Nook
(DRM-free)
Google Books
(DRM-free)
Apple iBooks
(DRM-free)
Kobo
(DRM-free)
Amazon
Booksense
(will locate a store near you!)
Barnes and Noble
Powells
Booksamillion

Canada:

Amazon Kindle
(DRM-free)
Kobo
(DRM-free)
Chapters/Indigo
Amazon.ca

Audiobook:

DRM-free download

Writing a speech is stupid. You write it and speak the words aloud -- I'd started off saying them into a webcam so that I could see what I looked like when I was talking, but I was so self-conscious about the horrible spectacle of all those stupid contrived words coming out of my spotty, awkward face -- and they sound as convincing as a cereal advert. The thing was, I'd heard plenty of speeches -- Scot Colford had done more than a few brilliant ones in his films -- and felt my heart soaring in response to the words entering my ears, so I knew it was possible to say things that moved people and maybe even changed their minds.

But I didn't know what words to say, or how to say them. I sat in my room, filling screen after screen with stupid, stupid words, discarding them, starting over, and finally, I called Cora.

I'd been chatting to her all the time lately. She loved the idea of reforming TIP, and said that all her schoolmates were geared up to help. They'd descend on every MP's surgery in Bradford with their parents in tow, and grab the lawmakers by the lapels and demand that they listen to reason and refuse to leave until they did. Cora was so much smarter than me. She was like 26 in that regard (and 26 probably called her even more than I did -- she'd adopted her as big sister and co-conspirator and the two were thick as thieves), just another one of the brilliant women in my life who were much, much cleverer than I'd ever be. Why weren't
they
giving the speech? Well cos 26 had already filled in for my speech, and cos Sewer Cinema had been my idea, and because, weird as it was, millions of people actually cared what films Cecil B. DeVil gave his seal of approval to.

Cora would understand what it was like to grow up in the kind of family where no one believed you could change anything, ever. She'd know exactly what to say to me. I dialed her and listened to it ring two, three times. I checked my watch. Bugger, she was at school. I was about to hang up when it was picked up.

"Cora?" I said.

"Cora's at school," my mum said. "She forgot her phone -- I found it between the sofa cushions. Is that Trent?"

I groaned inwardly. Mum and Dad and I had been on speaking terms since I'd gone back, and I rang them every fortnight or so to have a kind of ritualistic conversation about how many veggies I was eating and whether I was taking drugs or getting into trouble. The kind of conversation where everyone knows that the answers are lies, but pretends not to, in other words. I loved my parents and even missed them in a weird sort of way, but I hadn't gone to them for advice since I was a little nipper. I certainly wasn't planning on getting public speaking advice from my mum. The closest thing she'd ever come to giving a public speech was making the Christmas toast every year, and she was famously long-winded at that, too.

"How are you, Mum?"

"Can't complain, actually. Been looking up the drugs and that they have me taking for my legs, and you know what I discovered? Turns out the pills one doctor had given me, way back when I had
you
were very bad to take if you were on the other pills, the ones I've been on for about five years. So I stopped taking the old ones and I can't tell you how much of an improvement it made!"

"Wow," I said. "That's fantastic news!" My mum's legs have given her trouble all my life, and on the bad days, she could barely stand. It had all been getting much worse lately, too. This really was brilliant news.

"It's better than fantastic, you know. Now that I can get about a little more, I've been doing the physiotherapy and getting some more walks in, and I've found a ladies' walking group that goes out three evenings a week. It came up as an automatic suggestion when I was looking up the physio things, you understand. It's made such a difference, I can hardly believe it."

"Aw, Mum, I'm so happy for you! Honestly, that's just brilliant."

"Shall I tell Cora you called?"

I was about to thank her and ring off, but I stopped. She didn't sound like my mum somehow -- didn't have that note of deep, grinding misery from years and years of chronic pain. Didn't sound like she just wanted to make the world all go away. It was the sound of my mum on her rare good days, the few I remembered growing up, when we'd go to the park or even to a fun fair or a bonfire and she'd smile and we'd all smile back at her. When Mum was happy, the whole family shone.

"Mum? Can I ask you something?"

"Of course, sweetie, any time."

"Well, you know. I'm giving a speech soon, and --" I told her about the meeting and the talk I was supposed to give. "It's only meant to be fifteen minutes or so, but everything I write sounds so stupid. I'm going bonkers here."

She was quiet for a long time. "Trent," she said, "we haven't really talked much about this, I know. All this business with copyright and that. I think you probably think I disapprove of it all. But the truth is, you convinced me." My heart sped up. "I don't know how else to put it. When you started it all, the downloading and making your films, I thought it was a kind of hobby, and I guess it was, though if you say it's art, I'll say it's art. It's not like I'm any kind of authority on art, you know. Never had much use for it, to tell the truth. But the thing that convinced me isn't art or anything like it, it's the idea that protecting copyright is more important than our network connection. I mean, look at me. I was a complete disaster until I was able to use the Internet to look up my troubles. It helped me find people around the world who had the same problems as I did, and even helped me find ladies from right here on my own manor who could help me get out and about. It seems to me that everyone must have a story like this -- look at your sister's education, or your father's job, or the new people next door, the Kofis. They just had a baby, a darling little girl, and their poor old parents in Ghana can't come for a visit. So they have a visit over the video, every night. Take away their Internet, you take away that little girl's chance to know her granny and grandad. Seems to me that's just not right. If the only way the films and music and that can get made is by giving them the power to just cut off all our connections to one another and work and school and health, I think we should just let 'em die."

My mouth literally hung open. My mum hadn't said anything that profound to me since... well, forever. Or maybe she'd never said anything that profound at a time I was ready to hear it. I know that I'm often ready to ignore anything my parents say. But this came straight from Mum's heart, and she had clearly thought well hard about it. Had I ever wondered how I'd make any of this matter to my parents? What an idiot I was.

"Mum," I said, "that was genius. Really."

"Don't pull my leg, Sunshine. It was just what I feel. I thought that knowing you could convince a silly old woman might help you do your talk."

"Ma, seriously --" I felt for the words. "What you just said, it put it all into perspective for me. It's like --" And then I had it. "Never mind. Thanks, Mum! Love you!"

"Love you too, Trent." She sounded bemused now. I rang off and put my fingers back on the keyboard.

"It's easy to think nothing we do matters. After all, didn't we mob our MPs when they were debating -- or rather,
not debating
the Theft of Intellectual Property Bill? And they passed it anyway. Most of 'em didn't even turn up for work that day, couldn't be arsed to show up and defend the voters. And now they're throwing kids in jail at speed for downloading, cutting off families from the Internet as though losing your net access was like being sent to bed without supper."

I looked out over the crowd. They'd said it would be huge, but I hadn't really anticipated what
huge
really meant until I'd got up on the little podium at the end of the hall. The people looked like some kind of impossible "Where's Wally" drawing, like a kid's drawing of a football stadium where all the faces are represented by a kind of frogspawn cluster of little circles all touching one another. Many of the heads were crowned with odd, mirror-brimmed hats -- mossie-zappers, with green lasers ready to fight back the West Nile scourge. Even though no one was talking, there was an enormous wall of sound rising off the crowd -- whispers, shifting feet on floorboards, rasping of fabric from arms and legs. Part of me noted this in the abstract, wished I had a really good multichannel recording setup pointed out at the crowd to use for Foley sound the next time I wanted to edit a crowd into a film project.

I took a breath, the sound enormously magnified by the PA speakers beside the podium and set up around the room.

"Here's why I think we're going to win. Because we
all
need the net. Every day that goes by, more and more of us realize it." I looked again into the crowd, found Cora, who'd come down for the day to see me talk. She was in a little knot of her school chums, all come down together on the bus after much wheedling of parents who thought London would swallow them whole. "My mum just explained to me that when we lost our net connection, she wasn't able to get the health information she needed to help with her legs. She was sentenced to a year of agony, trapped in her flat, because I'd been accused of downloading. It cost my dad his job: up in Bradford, practically all the work there is comes over the net. He worked as a temp phone-banker, answering calls for a washing machine warranty program one day and taking orders for pizza the next day. It didn't pay much, but it was the best job he could get. And my sister --" I looked at Cora again. She was blushing, but she was grinning like a maniac, too. "She was in school, and you just imagine what it was like for her, trying to do her GCSEs without the net, when every other kid in her class had Google, all the books ever published, all those films and sound files and so on.

"My mum and dad aren't geeky kids who want to remix films. They're just plain northerners. I love them to bits, but they'd be the first to tell you they don't know anything about technology and all that business. But last week, my mum explained to me, better than I ever could, why the net matters to them, and why laws like TIP, which make the net's existence contingent on it not messing up the big entertainment companies' ancient business models, are bad for normal people like them.

"That's when I realized why we were going to win in the long run: every day, someone else in this country wakes up and discovers that his life depends on the net. It may be how he gets his wages, or how he stays healthy, or how he gets support from his family, or how he looks in on his old parents. Which means that, every day, someone in this country joins our side. All we need to do is make sure that they know we exist when that happens, and lucky for us, we've only got the entire sodding Internet to use to make that happen. It's why there are so many people joining up with pressure groups like Open Rights Group and all that lot.

"So we're going to win someday. It's just a matter of how many innocent people's lives get destroyed before that happens. I'd like that number to be as small as possible, and I'm sure you would too. So that's why I think it's worth trying to win this, today, now, here. Last year, our MPs didn't believe that enough voters cared about the net to make voting against TIP worth it? This year, they know different. Let's remind them of that, now that there's an election coming up. All of you who went out last time, it's time to pay a little 'I told you so' visit on your MP. And those of you who didn't care or didn't believe it was worth it last time: this time you need to care. This time it's worth it."

I drank some water. Something weird was happening: despite my dry throat and my thundering pulse, I was
enjoying
this! I could feel the talk's rhythm like I could feel the rhythm of a film when I was cutting it, and I knew that I was doing a good job. Not just because people were smiling and that, but because
I
could feel the rightness.

"They tell us that without these insane laws, our creativity will dry up and blow away. But I make films. You've seen them, I think --" A few people cheered in a friendly way, and I waved at them. "And I think they're plenty creative. But according to laws like TIP, they're not art, they're a crime." People booed. I grinned and waved them quiet again. "Now, maybe there used to be only one way to make a film, and maybe that way of making films meant that you needed certain kinds of laws. But there are plenty of ways to make films today, and yesterday's laws are getting in the way of today's film making. Maybe from now on, creativity means combining two things in a way that no one has ever thought of combining them before." I shrugged. "Maybe that's all it ever was. But I think my films should be allowed to exist, and that you should be allowed to watch them. I think that a law that protects creativity should protect all creativity, not just the kind of creativity that was successful fifty years ago."

I looked down at the face of my phone, resting on the podium. My countdown timer had nearly run out. I'd timed this talk to exactly ten minutes, and here I was, right at the end, after ten minutes exactly. I smiled and raised my voice.