Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  By that time, there were already fifteen more up before judges around the country. Most were kids. In each case, the Crown argued that the size of their collections qualified them for adult treatment after their twenty-first birthdays. In five more cases, the judge agreed. All were found guilty. Of course they were guilty. The law had been written to make them guilty.

  It wasn’t just kids, either. Every day, there was news about video- and file-hosting services shutting down. One, a site that had never been much for pirate clips, just mostly videos that people took while they were out playing and that, posted this notice to its front door:

  After eight years of serving Britain’s amateur videographers, filmmakers, and communities, UKTube is shutting its doors. As you no doubt know, Parliament passed the Theft of Intellectual Property Act earlier this month, and with it, created a whole new realm of liability and risk for anyone who allows the public to host content online.

  According to our solicitors, we now have to pay a copyright specialist to examine each and every video you upload to make sure it doesn’t infringe on copyright before we make it live. The cheapest of these specialists comes at about £200/hour, and it takes about an hour to examine a ten-minute video.

  Now, we get an average of fourteen hours’ worth of video uploaded every minute. Do the maths: in order to stay on the right side of the law, we’d have to spend £16,800 a minute in legal fees. Even if there were that many solicitors available—and there aren’t!—we only turn over about £4,000 a day. We’d go bankrupt in ten minutes at that rate.

  We don’t know if Parliament intended to shut down this site and all the others like it, or whether this side effect is just depraved indifference on their part. What we do know is that this site has never been a haven for piracy. We have a dedicated, round-the-clock team of specialists devoted to investigating copyright complaints and removing offending material as quickly as possible. We’re industry leaders at it, and we spend a large amount of our operating budget on this.

  But it didn’t get us anywhere. Bending over to help the big film companies police their copyrights cost us a fortune, and they thanked us by detonating a legal suicide bomb in the middle of our offices. You hear a lot of talk about terrorism these days. That word gets thrown around a lot. But a terrorist is someone who attacks innocent civilians to make a point. We’ll leave it to you to decide whether it applies here.

  In the meantime, we’ve shut our doors. The hundred-plus Britons who worked for us are now looking for jobs. We’ve set up a page here where you can review their CVs if you’re hiring. We vouch for all of them.

  We struggled with the problem of what to do with all the video you’ve entrusted to us over the years. In the end, we decided to send a set of our backups to the Internet Archive, archive.org, which has a new server array in Iceland, where—for the time being—the laws are more sensible than they are here. The kind people at archive.org are working hard to bring it online, and once it is, you’ll be able to download your creations again. Sorry to say that we’re not sure when that will happen, though.

  And that’s it. We’re done.

  Wait.

  We’re not quite done.

  We have a message for the bullies from the big film studios and the politicians who serve them: UKTube is one of many legitimate, British businesses that you have murdered with the stroke of your pen this month. In your haste to deliver larger profits to a few entertainment giants, you’ve let them design a set of rules that outlaws anyone who competes with them: any place where normal, everyday people can simply communicate with one another.

  We’ve been a place where dying people can share their final thoughts with their loved ones; where people in trouble can raise funds or support; where political movements were born and organized and sustained. All of that is collateral damage in your war on piracy—a crime that you seem to have defined as “anything we don’t like or that eats into our bottom line.”

  Lucky for humanity, not every country will be as quick to sell out as Britain. Unlucky for Britain, though: our government has sacrificed our competitiveness and our future. Britain’s best and brightest will not stay here long. Other countries will welcome them with open arms, and each one that leaves will be a loss for this backward-looking land.

  That actually made the news, and they cornered some MPs who’d supported the legislation about it, who sneered about histrionics and hysteria and theft, and they got some of the people who’d enjoyed using UKTube to talk about their favorite videos, and that was that.

  But not for me. When UKTube shut down, half a dozen more followed. More and more proxies were blocked off by the ISP that supplied the council estate next to the Zeroday. It felt like there was a noose tightening around my neck, and it was getting harder to breathe every day.

  26 thumped my mattress, and said, “Come to bed, Cecil, bloody hell, it’s been hours. I’m going to have to get up for school soon.”

  I jumped guiltily. I’d been sitting on the floor, back to the wall, knees drawn up and laptop balanced on them, reading the debates online, reading about how much money the different parties had taken in from the big film and record and publishing companies in contributions.

  I scrubbed at my eyes with my fists. “It’s hopeless,” I said. “Bloody hopeless. We got all those people to go to their MPs. It didn’t matter. We might as well have done nothing. What a waste.”

  26 propped herself up on one elbow, the sheet slipping away from her chest, which got my pulse going. “Cecil,” she said. “Trent.” I startled again. She’d never called me that before. “Just because it didn’t work, that doesn’t mean it’s hopeless, or a waste. At least now people understand how corrupt the process is, how broken the whole system is. The film studios just keep repeating the word theft over and over again, the way the coppers do with terrorism, hoping that our brains will switch off when we hear it.” She put on a squeaky cartoon voice. “Stealing is wrong, kids! It makes for a good, simplistic story that idiots can tell each other over their Egg McMuffins in the morning.

  “But once they start passing these dirty laws through their dirty tricks, they show us all how corrupt they are. If it’s just theft, then why do they need to get their laws passed in the dead of the night, without debate or discussion? Bloody hell, if it’s just theft, then why aren’t the penalties the same as for thieving? Nick a film from HMV and you’ll pay a twenty-quid fine, if that. Download the same film from some Pirate Bay in Romania and they stick you in jail. Bugger that.

  “Maybe now the average Daily Mail reader will start to ask himself, ‘How come they never have to sneak around to get a law passed against actual theft? What if this isn’t just stealing after all?’” I could tell what she was trying to do, make me feel better. I could have gone along with it, told her she was right and crawled into bed with her and tried to get some sleep. But I wasn’t in the mood. I was feeling nasty and angry. “Why should they wake up this time? Your mate Annika, doesn’t she say that there’ve been eleven other copyright laws in the past fifteen years? Are we supposed to wait for ten or fifteen more? When will this great uprising finally take place? How many kids will we see in prison before it happens?”

  I was shaking and my hands were in fists. 26’s eyes were wide-open now, the sleep gone. She looked momentarily angry and I was sure we were about to have our usual stupid barney, a bicker that went nowhere because we were both too stubborn to back down. But then her face softened and she shifted over to me and put a warm arm around my shoulders.

  “Hey,” she said. “What’s got you so lathered up?”

  “I just keep thinking that this could be me. It probably will be me, someday. Or it’ll be my sister, Cora. She’s careful, but what if she messes up? She needs to be perfectly careful every time. They just need to catch her once.”

  She cuddled me for a long moment. “So what do you want to do?”

  I thumped the floor so hard my fist felt like I’d smashed it with a hammer. “I don’t know. Fi
ght. Fight back. Jesus, they’re going to get me sooner or later. Why not go down swinging? Every time I go past a cinema and see a queue out the door, I think, look at those fools, every penny they spend is turned into profits that are used to pass laws imprisoning their own children. Can’t they see?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “We should do something,” I said. “We should do—I don’t know. We should blow up all the cinemas.”

  “Oh, that’ll make people sympathetic to your cause.”

  “Wait till they’re empty,” I said. “Of course.”

  “Keep thinking,” she said.

  “OK, fine. But I want to go to war now. No more complaining. No more campaigning. Time to do something real.”

  Chapter 4

  A SHOT ACROSS THE BOW/FRIENDS FROM AFAR/WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR BOAT/LET’S PUT ON A SHOW!

  What’s worse than making a great comic into a crap film? Making a great comic into eighteen crap films. Which is exactly what they did to Milady de Winter, which sold tons of books in Japan before it was translated into English and forty-five other languages, sweeping the globe with its modern retelling of The Three Musketeers. So naturally, it became one of the most anticipated films of the century by kids all over the planet. They signed the best-grossing adult actors in Hollywood to play the villains, and imported two Bollywood actors, Prita Kapoor and Rajiv Kumar, to play the beautiful visiting princess and the evil king of the thieves. The producer, who mostly made films where computer-generated spaceships fought deadly duels over poorly explained political differences, explained that these actors would “Open up the billion-strong Desi film-going market,” in an interview that made it clear that his $400,000,000 film was an investment vehicle, not a piece of art.

  They got the cutest child actors. The finest special-effects wizards. The best toy and video-game tie-ins, and advertisements that were slathered over every stationary surface and public vehicle in places as distant and unlikely as Bradford, and Milady de Winter was a success. Opening weekend box office smashed all records with a $225,000,000 tally, and all told, the first one alone was reckoned as a billion-dollar profit to Paramount studios and its investors.

  Only one problem: it was an utter piece of shit. Seriously. I saw it when I was only twelve and even though I was barely a fan of the comics, even I was offended on behalf of every halfway intelligent kid in the world. Every actor in the film was brilliant, but the words they were asked to speak were not; it was like the film had been written with boxing gloves on. Whenever the dialog got too horrible to bear, the director threw in another high-speed and pointless action sequence, each wankier and stupider than the last, until by the end of the film, it was climaxing with a scene where swordfighters leapt hundreds of feet into the air, tossing their swords into enemy soldiers as they fell, skewering several at once like a kebab, then doing an acrobatic midair somersault, snatching the blades clean of the dead bad guys, and whirling them overhead like a helicopter rotor for a gentle landing. The critics hated it. The reviews were so uniformly negative that the quotes on the film posters were reduced to a single word, like:

  “Action”—The New York Times

  “Fast”—The Guardian

  “Adventure”—The Globe and Mail

  Of course, the actual reviews said things like, “Too much action, not enough thought,” or “Scenes that move fast without managing to excite,” or “Turning one of history’s best-loved adventure stories into yet another trite Hollywood blockbuster.”

  So, what happened with this miserable, festering gush of cinematic puke? It was only the most profitable film in history. So profitable that they were already shooting the sequel before the opening weekend. Everybody I know saw them. Even me. And no one I knew liked them, but we all went anyway. And there was so much marketing tie-in, it was impossible to avoid: school gave out orange squash in Milady de Winter paper cups on fun-run days, sad men on the streets holding signs handed out Milady de Winter coupons for free chips at Yankee Fried Chicken and Fish (which didn’t even let schoolkids eat there), the animated hoardings during the World Cup replayed the stupidest scenes in endless loops.

  The standard joke was that Milady de Winter films were just barely tolerable if you downloaded the Italian dubbed version and pretended you were looking at an opera. I tried it. It didn’t make the experience any better. And still, we kept going to see the sequels, and still, they kept making more, two or sometimes three per year.

  Part 18 was scheduled for a grand London opening late in October. The openings rotated between Mumbai, New York, Los Angeles, and London, and lucky us, it was our turn. Everyone had a Milady de Winter joke, graffiti artists drew mustaches or boils or giant willies on the faces of the stars that went up on every billboard (the child actors had grown old and been replaced by new ones; the adult actors had found themselves forever unable to be cast in anything except a Milady de Winter film). But the polls in the freesheets reported that most Londoners were planning to go see Part 18, which was called D’Artagnan’s Blood-Oath.

  And so were the Jammie Dodgers.

  Little known fact about pirate film downloads: most of ’em come from people who work for the film studios. A picture as big and complicated as D’Artagnan’s Blood-Oath has hundreds, if not thousands, of workers and actors and cutters and sound-effects people who handle it before it gets released. And just like everyone else in the world, they take their work home with them (I once watched an interview with a SFX lady who said that when it came to the really big films, she often started working from the moment she got up, at 7:00 A.M., stopping only to shower and get on the bus to the studio). With that many copies floating around, it’s inevitable that one or more will get sent to a mate for a sneaky peek, and from there, they slither out onto the net.

  Hollywood acts like every film you download comes from some kid who sneaks a camera or a high-end phone into a cinema, and they’ve bought all kinds of laws allowing them to search you on your way into the screen, like you were boarding an airplane. But it’s all rubbish: stop every kid with a camera and the number of early pirate films will drop by approximately zero percent. It’s like the alcoholic dad in a gritty true-life film: he can’t control his own life, so he tries to control everyone else’s. The studios can’t control their own people, so they come after us.

  Which is how I got my hands on a copy of Part 18 a month before it opened in London (I can’t bring myself to keep calling it D’Artagnan’s Blood-Oath, which sounds more like an educational film about a teenaged girl struggling with her first monthly visitor). It was all the rage on Cynical April, where we were all competing to see who could do the most outrageous recuts. They were good for laughs, but I had bigger plans.

  It started when I went with Jem to visit Aziz. Jem was after some new networking gear for a project he was all hush-hush about, while I was thinking it’d be nice to get a couple of very large flat-panel displays, better than the beamers I was using at the Zeroday when I edited, because they’d work with the lights on full-go, letting me edit even when 26 was over doing her homework.

  As we wound our way through Aziz’s shelves, he pointed out his most recent finds, and stubbed his toe on a carton the size of a shoe box that rattled.

  He cussed fluently at it, then gave it a shove toward an overflowing shelf.

  “What is that, anyway?” I said.

  “Thumb drives,” he said. “A thousand of ’em, all told.” He gestured at more small cartons.

  I boggled. Sure, I had a dozen of them back at the Zeroday, ones we’d found at the charity shops and stuff. They were useful for carrying files you didn’t want to keep on your mobile, or for loading onto older machines that didn’t have working wireless links. Like most of the people I knew, I treated them as semi-disposable and never thought of them as very valuable. But a thousand of them—that was getting into serious money.

  “Bugger,” I said. “Are you going to sell ’em?”

  He snorted. “These aren’t the k
ind you sell. They’re ancient. Only thirty-two gigabytes each. I only keep ’em here because I’m convinced someone will find something better to do with them than chucking them in a landfill.”

  “I might just take you up on that,” I said, and my mind started to whirl.

  I don’t think I’d ever seen a 32 gig stick before then—the ones we got in first year were 128s, and they were obsolete and nearly filled with crap adverts for junk food and Disneyland Paris from the start. These ones were shaped like little footballs and emblazoned with the logo for something called Major League Soccer, which I looked up later (it was a sad, defunct American football league that had made an unsuccessful attempt to gain popularity in the UK before I was born, dating the sticks to nearly two decades before).

  Thirty-two gigs was such a ludicrously tiny size, compared to the terabyte versions for sale in the little dry-cleaner/newsagent/phone unlocking place by Old Street Station—it would take thirty of the little footballs to equal just one of those. What the hell could you put on one of those?

  “You’re joking,” Rabid Dog said, as I thought aloud about this in the pub room of the Zeroday, one dark September night as the wind howled and the rain lashed at the shutters over the windows. He’d got a lot less shy lately, and I hadn’t caught him wanking in weeks. “Thirty-two gigs is tons of space. You could stick fifty 640 by 480 videos on one of those.”

  “Yeah, and I could get like a million films on there if I was willing to knock them down to ten by ten. You could pretend you were watching film on a screen ten miles away. Who cares about 640 by 480?”