Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  “It’s a real favorite,” I said. I felt really weird in my suit now. The MP was wearing a flowy kind of dress with a big scarf—it was cold in her drafty office—and had taken off her shoes and crossed her legs, showing off her heavy wool socks with multicolor stripes. The only other person in formal clothes was the security guard out front, who hadn’t even bothered to ask us for ID or to go through the metal-detector, having recognized 26 straight off.

  “So,” Letitia said, leaning forward to get down to business. “26 has told you about the bill, yes?”

  I shrugged. “I guess so. I don’t really know much about Parliamentary procedure or anything—”

  Letitia nodded. “Okay, well, a private member’s bill is usually just a kind of empty protest. The way it works is, an MP like me introduces it, rather than the governing party as a whole. If the government doesn’t want it to pass, it’s easy enough to knock down again, you just talk it out until the time for debate expires, and it dies. But sometimes a private member’s bill is a way for the government to get a law passed without having to actually propose it themselves. They get someone like me, from the opposition, to propose the bill, then the Speaker gives it enough time for a full debate, a hearing in the Lords, and a vote and hey, presto, we’ve got a law! It’s sneaky, but it’s how we got some of our most, ahem, controversial laws passed.

  “So here’s the idea. I’m going to introduce a bill to amend the Theft of Intellectual Property Act. It will rescind all criminal penalties and end the practice of terminating Internet connections on accusation of piracy. In return, it will explicitly permit rights-holder groups to offer what are called blanket licenses to ISPs. These are already widely used—for example, when the DJ at Radio 2 decides to play a song, she doesn’t have to track down the record label’s lawyer and negotiate the fee for the use. Instead, all the music ever recorded is available to her for one blanket fee, and the money the BBC pays gets divided up and paid to artists. Under this scheme, film studios, game companies, publishers, and music companies could offer ISPs a per-user/per-month fee in exchange for unlimited sharing of all music, books, and films.”

  I tried to make sense of that. “You mean, I sign up with Virgin and give them, whatever, fifteen pounds a month for my Internet. They give five pounds to these groups, and I get to download everything?”

  She nodded. “Yes, that’s it exactly. It’s no different, really, to what already goes on in most places. For example, when you go to a shop and they’re playing music, they pay a small fee every month to what’s called a ‘collecting society’ that pays musicians for the usage. Collecting societies around the world have deals with one another, and some insanely complicated accounting for paying one anothers’ members. They’re big and often very corrupt, but it seems to me that making the collecting societies fairer is an easier job than convincing everyone to stop getting up to naughty Internet copying. We’ve put more than eight hundred people in jail now for copying. Just imagine! It costs the state more than £40,000 per year to keep them there—that’s £40,000 we’re not spending on education, or health, or roads—or arts funding for films and music! It’s an absolute disgrace.”

  She seemed to notice that she was practically frothing at the mouth and she calmed herself down with a visible effort. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t get emotional about this, but it’s just so dreadful. We keep passing worse and worse laws, and they’re not solving the problem. It’s a disease you get in government—like passing a law against marijuana, then passing worse and worse laws against it, until the prisons are busting with people who really shouldn’t be there, and by then, you’re so committed to a ridiculous law that you can’t back down without looking terminally foolish for having supported it in the first place.” She heaved a sigh.

  “Anyway, the reason I asked you to come in today is because I’ve had a nice quiet chat in private with the Speaker of the House, who wanted me to know that if I was to introduce such a bill, he’d be inclined to allow for a full debate and put it to a vote. And he strongly hinted that his party’s whips would see to it that all the MPs turned up for work that day and voted in favor of it. And I’ve been in touch with my party’s leader, and she’s inclined to let my lot vote our conscience, and I’m pretty certain that we’d all vote for it, barring one or two nutters who want to have practically everyone banged in prison for the next two hundred years or so, just to teach ’em a lesson.”

  My eyes felt like they were bugging out of my head, and I realized I literally had my mouth open so far I was beginning to dribble. I was still reeling with the fact that this Member of bloody Parliament had just told me she thought spliff should be legal and part of my brain was jumping up and down trying to get my attention, because that same MP was also proposing to repeal TIP, and even more, repeal the ancient Digital Economy Act that had got me and my family knocked off the Internet.

  26 slugged me in the shoulder and then threw her arms around me and squeezed me so hard I felt like my lunch was going to make a second appearance. “Isn’t it amazing?” she said.

  I nodded vigorously. “Yes, but, erm—”

  Letitia looked at me. “Yes?”

  “What are you telling us for?” I didn’t say it, but I was thinking, we’re just a couple of kids!

  She clapped her hands to her mouth. “Oh! Didn’t I say? No? Well, of course you two are absolutely crucial to making this happen. The fact is, as soon as any of the horrible grasping lobbyists from the other side get a whiff of this, they’ll be all over us—getting famous actors and pop stars to drop in on MPs, calling up Members and reminding them of all the money they donated to their election campaigns, that sort of thing. If this is to have a hope of passing, there’s got to be enormous counterpressure on every MP in the country. Even more than with TIP—you’re going to have to get loads of voters to come out with real, passionate support for the bill. What’s more, you’re going to have to be prepared for everyone calling you thieves and worse. It seems to me, though, that you and your friends have a damned good rebuttal to that sort of thing: you’re making films that people purely love, that are being watched all around the world, and you’ve not made a penny off them. It’s plain to me that you lot aren’t just cheapskates after a free film or two: you’re filmmakers yourselves, exactly the sort of person our copyright’s meant to be protecting, and here we are, putting you in jail.”

  I shook my head. Could it be possible? “So, you’re saying we’ll basically be the poster children for a complete overhaul of British copyright law?”

  She laughed. “If you want to put it that way. The fact is that there’s almost certainly going to be an election called in the next three months; the government can’t wait more than four months in any event. They’ve been in office for nearly five years now, that’s the maximum, and odds are good they’ll hold the election in May in order to tie it in with regional and council elections, which saves loads of money and always looks good when you’re running for reelection. The party in power knows that they’re vulnerable on this issue, and all the other parties are eyeing up the possibility of going into the election having championed such a popular cause. So everyone’s got a reason to want to see this pass, provided the other side doesn’t outflank us. But I like our odds. You lot are adorable, talented, and clearly harmless. They’ll have a hard time painting you to look like villains.”

  She sipped at her mug of tea. “Not that they won’t try, of course.”

  * * *

  Annika called another meeting in the basement of the Turkish restaurant in Brick Lane the next week. There were the same carob brownies, but there was lots more besides: Jem and Dodger had spent two days in the kitchen, turning out all kinds of little delicacies, like miniature eel pies, plum puddings, tiny plates of stewed rabbit, and fluffy scones. I thought they’d overdone it when we’d loaded it all into six huge boxes to take down to Brick Lane on the buses, but there were so many people in the restaurant’s basement that the food wa
s gone in seconds. I was used to the Pirate Cinema nights being crowded—there’d been one in an old civil defense tunnel that had been so claustrophobic I’d had to leg it up the endless stairs to the surface before I had a panic attack, and it was a good job nothing caught fire because no one could have got out. But this was nearly as bad as that worst-ever night. The restaurant’s owner kept bringing down pitchers of beer and stacks of cups and platters of mezzes and whomever was closest to the bottom of the stairs would have a whip-round for the money to pay for it, then the grub and booze would disappear into the heaving mass.

  Annika called the meeting to order by the simple expedient of climbing up onto a table, extending her hands before her, and clapping a simple, slow rhythm: Clap. Clap. Clap. The people around her joined in, then the people around them, and in a few minutes, no one could possibly carry on a conversation. It was quite the little magic trick: clearly, Annika had run a meeting or two in her day.

  She stopped clapping and made a pushing-down gesture, like she was patting an invisible table at chest height and like magic, the clapping stopped and all fell silent in the steaming-hot basement. The rasp of all those breaths was like the sound of distant rain. Like I said: magic.

  “Right then,” Annika said. “Let’s get Cecil up here.”

  This was the part of the plan I wasn’t exactly certain about. I’d introduced many of the Pirate Cinema screenings, but after the first night, I’d always worn a mask. But everyone knew what I looked like, thanks to Sewer Cinema, and all my mates figured I’d be able to explain it.

  I jumped onto the table, helped up by Annika, and looked into the sea of faces. I had a scrap of paper on which I’d scribbled some notes, but I couldn’t focus on it. Annika’s hand had been slippery with sweat, and I could feel my own sweat running down my neck and back.

  “Erm,” I said. I felt physically sick, like I was going to throw up. All these people, looking at me. What the hell did I know about it? A few days before, I hadn’t even known what a Private Member’s Bill was. I was just some kid who liked to cut up films. “Erm,” I said again. My vision swam.

  I shook my head. There were words on the sweaty bit of paper, but I literally couldn’t make my mouth form any kind of coherent statement. And the faces! They were all staring and some of them were smirking and a few had started whispering to their neighbors, and all of a sudden it was all too much. I shook my head and muttered, “I’m sorry,” and got off the table and pushed my way out of the crowd and up the stairs. Out on Brick Lane, it was shitting down drizzle, that wet stupid gray low-sky weather that London seemed to have from October to May.

  I stalked away down the road, half expecting that at any second one of my mates or 26 would grab me and spin me around and tell me off for panicking and then give me a cuddle and tell me it was all okay, but no one did. I came out to Bethnal Green Road, among the Bangladeshi shops and the discount off-licenses and taxi touts and tramps selling picked-over rubbish off of blankets, and drunks reeling through the night with tins of lager held high. London had never seemed more miserable to me than at that moment. What had come over me? I’ll tell you what: the sudden, terrible knowledge that I had no idea what I was doing, I was just a kid, and I was going to cock it all up. I wasn’t a leader, I wasn’t a spokesman. I was a school-leaver from Bradford who liked to make funny films.

  In my imagination, my mates were all standing around the restaurant’s basement, shaking their heads knowingly at one another, muttering things like, “Bloody Cecil, what a little drama queen, knew he never had it in him.”

  I went home, studying my shoes in excruciating detail on the long walk, bumping into people and poles and rubbish bins. I let myself in the front door, opened the fridge door, stared unseeingly at the interior. I wanted to obliterate my mind: get drunk, smoke spliff, take a little sugar. There was no booze in the house, no weed, but right outside the door, there was as much sugar as I could possibly want. The drugs lookouts knew us all, of course, and didn’t bother to set up their birdcalls when we came in and out, and I knew plenty by sight. I didn’t have a penny to my name, but I was willing to bet that someone would supply me with a sweet gasp on credit. They all knew where I lived.

  I stood at the front door for a long time, hand on the knob, feet jammed into my unlaced boots. My calves and feet still ached from the long walk home, my mind was wrapped in a gauze of shame and self-pity. I seemed to be looking at myself from a long way away, outside of my body, watching as my hand began to turn the doorknob and I thought, all right then, he’s going to do it, he’s going to go and score some sugar. At that moment, the boy with his hand on the doorknob was someone else, not me. I was watching myself with bland interest, like it was all some video I’d shrunk down to a postage stamp and stuck on one corner of my screen.

  Oh look, that silly lad’s off to get stoned on something that might just be nail-varnish remover fumes. I thought, and then the little voice in the back of my head that had been shouting in fear and anger came to the fore and I swam back to my body and let go of the doorknob. I gasped and stepped back and scrubbed at my eyes with my fists. I was crying.

  I decided to go to bed. If I couldn’t sleep, I could always go outside and score later. The sugar shacks weren’t going anywhere.

  I slept.

  * * *

  When I woke, I lay in bed and stared at the messy floor and the door for a long time. I checked my phone. It was only 11:00 A.M. Everyone would be asleep for hours, assuming they got in at their usual four or five in the morning. Just to be on the safe side, I slunk downstairs on cat’s feet, not wanting to run into any of my housemates and face their anger—or worse, their pity. I had plenty of pity for all of us.

  I got dressed and picked up a sign bedecked with a hand-sterilizer pump, a packet of tissues, a packet of deodorant wipes, and a chewable toothbrush dispenser. I rolled it into a tube and headed for Old Street Station, found an exit that no one else was begging in, and began to rattle the sign hopefully at the passersby.

  I guess I must have been a dead sorry sight, because I raked in the dosh—seventy pounds in two hours, an unheard-of sum. I was out of the sanitizer and the toothbrushes, and running low on everything else. I went round to the other exits and found Lucy and Fred and gave them half of it. Lucy gave me a long, slightly smelly hug, and I was glad for it—someone in this world who was even worse off than me thought I was brilliant, that counted for something, didn’t it?

  It was 4:00 P.M. by the time I got back to the Zeroday. I went in by the old entrance up at the top of the fire escape, the one we’d stopped using after we got legit with Rob, hoping to avoid everyone if possible. I snuck back into my room, noticing that all the lights were still off—I supposed that everyone must have got up and gone out. Good.

  I stared at my phone for a long time. 26 hadn’t called me. Of course she hadn’t. Why would she want to talk to a pathetic sack like me? I lay on my bed, wishing I could go to sleep and shut out the world. I thought of sugar again, and of the thirty-five quid in my pocket. That would buy more than enough sugar to see me off for the night. My personal camera began to dolly out, zooming away from my body again, and I knew that if I didn’t do something now, that person on the bed with the red-rimmed eyes was going to go out and do something bloody stupid.

  So I grabbed my lappie and logged into Confusing Peach. Of course, it was all chatter about last night. I looked away, but I couldn’t not read it. I read it.

  Then I stood bolt upright, grabbed my jacket, and ran for the door, barely stopping to lock it behind me. I was dialing 26’s number as I tore down Bow High Street, hitting the wrong speed-dial icon three times before I got through, only to reach her voice mail without a ring. I called Jem next, then Dog and Chester and even Dodger—all the numbers I had for the people who’d been in the cellar the night before. No one was answering. I thought I must have Aziz’s number somewhere, so I stopped running, grabbed my laptop from my bag and crouched down against the window of a shop while
I went through old messages looking for it. I found it and dialed the number with shaking fingers.

  It rang six times and then Aziz answered, with a distracted, “’Lo?”

  “Aziz, mate, it’s me, Cecil.”

  “Yeah, hullo, Cecil. Listen, son, I’m kinda busy—”

  “They’ve all been arrested, Aziz, all of them—Jem and Chester and Dodger and Dog and my girlfriend all, well, all of them! It was on Confusing Peach this morning—the coppers raided a meeting last night about this copyright bill, said they were after the pirates who’d been running the cinemas.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Aziz?”

  “One sec,” he said. I heard his fingers clattering over a keyboard, then the grinding hum of a shredder. “Do go on,” he said, calmly.

  I opened and shut my mouth a couple times. “I don’t know what to say, Aziz! I’m going spare, mate. What do I do?”

  He sighed. “Look, Cecil, you’re a good young fellow, but you’re young. And when you’re young, you still haven’t learned that getting all in a lather doesn’t help anything. I can hear you panting from here. Take several deep breaths, clear your head, and have a good think. People go to jail all the time. They haven’t been convicted of anything yet, and if they are, it, erm, won’t be due to any evidence on my premises.” I heard the shredder whir again. “Meantime, calm the hell down and see what kinds of solutions present themselves.”