Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  “You should put out a press release,” he said. “Or call the Guinness World’s Records people. I think this may be the thickest claims-sheet in British legal history. You could probably get a prize or something.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Like a £78 million bill.” That was the damages being sought by the studios. They were seeking maximum statutory damages for each separate infringement (and I was rather bemused to see that they got some of the clips wrong—for example, in that virginity-losing scene that started this whole mess, they mixed up Bikini Trouble in Little Blackpool with Summerfun Lollypop, which I’d never heard of. I rushed straight out and downloaded it, then kicked myself because Monalisa was so much better in it and there was all kinds of audio I could have lifted—if I ever did a recut, I’d have to use that one, for sure).

  He waggled his fingers at me. “Young man, unless I am very far wrong, you don’t actually have £78 million.”

  “Not quite that much, no.”

  “I hope you won’t take offense when I say that I believe that your net worth—exclusive of your not inconsiderable talents and charm—is more like zero million pounds.”

  “I don’t even have zero hundred pounds.”

  “Quite so. We have a name for people like you: we call you ‘judgment proof.’ Doesn’t matter how much the judge orders you to pay, you won’t be able to pay it.”

  “What about my parents?”

  “Do they own property, or a car, or have substantial savings or shares or bonds? Rare works of art?”

  I shook my head.

  “There you are, then. There is always the possibility that they’ll try to bring a criminal charge against you. But as I’ve said, I’m reasonably certain that the director of public prosecutions isn’t going to try to make a case for breaking and entering, and that leaves criminal infringement, but I don’t think even the Theft of Intellectual Property Act is going to help them there. You weren’t making full copies of commercial films available, so they can’t get you under the piracy section. Your biggest risk is that they’ll seek to permanently bar you from using computers or the Internet, but that won’t stand up to a spirited defense. So, basically I think this is intended to serve as a nuisance. You’re going to have to scrounge up a solicitor and a barrister to get up for you in court. I can recommend some good sorts who’d do the instructing for me, assuming you’d be happy to have me speak for you in court?”

  I shook my head. “Of course I’d want you to be my lawyer, but I don’t really understand all this stuff. Solicitor, barrister—it’s just another way of saying ‘lawyer,’ right?”

  He shook his head with mock sorrow. “You’ve clearly been raised on American courtroom dramas. You should go dig up some Rumpole programs, they’re good fun, and not a bad look in at the profession.” He held up a hand. “On second thought, let me make a gift of the DVDs, right? We’ve got a set around here somewhere. Let’s not have you downloading anything naughty while this business is going on, at least not on my account.”

  I smiled back, but I was thinking, Not download? You’re having a laugh, right? I didn’t really stop to count up how much downloading I was likely to do in a given day, but of course, it was an immense load. I probably broke the law a few thousand times a day.

  “Anyroad, let me explain this for you quickly. It’s all very archaic, but that’s British justice for you—or, rather, justice in England and Wales, because it would all be too simple if it worked the same way in Scotland and Northern Ireland, right? Right. Okay, so there’s two kinds of lawyer you need to occupy yourself with at this stage. There are solicitors, and barristers. A solicitor writes up threatening legal letters, prepares cases, files motions, advises clients on the finer points of law and so forth. A barrister is a low, brawling sort of fellow who actually goes to court—sometimes dressed in the most bizarre clown costume you can imagine, horsehair wig and great black robe like you were getting up to play the angel of death in a cheap melodrama—and tries to persuade a judge or a magistrate or a jury that you’re innocent. We question witnesses, make arguments, the sort of thing you’ll see in the third act of a courtroom drama.

  “Wasn’t too long ago that a barrister couldn’t get a client for himself—we’d be brought on by the solicitor, who’d be hired by the defendant. These days, it’s merely frowned upon, but I’ve never let that worry me. Nevertheless, I can’t represent you on my own—I need to be instructed by a solicitor, and so we need to find you one of those upstanding chaps. Since you haven’t any money, we’ll either have to raise some, or find someone who’ll be your solicitor pro bono—that is, for free.”

  I squirmed. “I suppose I could ask people for money, but I’d much rather they gave it to the campaign to repeal TIP.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I expect the people who cooked up this preposterousness figured that it would suck your time and other peoples’ money and divert it from being used to fight their pet law. It’s not a bad move, truth be told. Filing lawsuits like this can’t be too expensive for them, as they’ve been doing them in onesie-twosies for years, it’s just a matter of ganging them all up into one massive docket. All in all, a reasonably cheap way of taking you out of commission. You should be proud—they think you’re important enough to neutralize. A mere stripling of seventeen! Dearie me, next thing they’ll be fleeing in terror before an army of adolescents with bum-fluff mustaches a cat could lick off!”

  We were sat in his basement workshop, and as he talked, he kept busy flitting between his kegs and jars and that, adjusting pressures, sipping, adulterating. Now he drew me off a cracked enamel cupful of something the color of honey. “Try that one,” he said.

  I sipped. It was astounding—a bit of sweet, a bit of lemon, and the beery sourness, all mingled together in a fizzy, cool drink that felt like it was dancing on my tongue. “Woah,” I gasped after swallowing. “That’s fantastic stuff.”

  He touched the brim of his laser-ringed hat. “Always thought I’d have been a brewer if I hadn’t gone in for the law. Nice to have something to fall back on, anyway.”

  Chapter 12

  TIP-EX!/DON’T BE CLEVER/A SYMPATHETIC DESCENDANT

  The campaign was picking up steam now. Rabid Dog—who had healed up faster than any of us would have credited, though there was still something wrong with his nose and he seemed to have trouble breathing through it—came up with the name for it: “TIP-Ex,” after Tipp-Ex, the old correction fluid you used to cover up mistakes with ink. I dimly knew the stuff existed, though I didn’t do too much writing with pen. It was iconic, something that had been part of every office and home for more than fifty years, and the little bottles with their red labels were instantly recognizable, and perfect for repurposing into logos for webpages and avatars for the social sites.

  The amazing thing about it all was how many people I’d never heard of seemed to care about it. I’d look at the news on any given day and there’d be five or six articles on local TIP-Ex campaigners organizing mass meetings, a demonstration outside the local chain cinema, or descending en masse on their MPs’ offices. All over England and Wales and Northern Ireland, even in Scotland, though their Parliament had refused to implement TIP in the first place. Then reporters would run around and stick mics in MPs’ faces and ask them what they planned on doing about this, and they’d all harrumph and make very serious noises about having serious debates and taking things seriously, seriously.

  Letitia told me that this was all good news, but that we couldn’t count on anything until the day the vote came in. The Lords were scheduled to start their debate in ten days, and the mailing lists were alive with grown-up clever people who were writing position papers and that for them. I just tried to follow along. I mean, I could get my head around the idea that there was a Parliament full of Members who were elected, but then there was this other bunch of lawmakers who were all Lords and Ladies, which made me think of fairy tales.

  I didn’t even know that they weren’t “proper” lords until 26 explai
ned it to me. I’d just assumed that the House of Lords was full of poshos whose great-great-grandads had killed a bunch of Normans in 1066 and had therefore guaranteed their descendants a seat in government forever. It turned out that there were a few of those around, but most of the Lords were “life peers,” who got appointed by the big political parties, though technically the King still had to wave his magic sword at them and make them into extraspecial lordly types. They got to hang around for life, and didn’t have to worry about getting reelected, and apparently there were a load of very young ones (“very young” in this case meaning forty, which made me realize that the rest of them must be as old as Jesus) that were dead keen on technology and stuff.

  The Lords would debate the TIP-Ex bill, and made changes and that, and then send it back to Parliament for more debate. Apparently, Parliament didn’t have to listen to them, but they usually did. There was a lot of this sort of thing, it seemed to me—stuff that worked one way on paper and another way in practice. I tried to make sense of it, but ultimately I reckoned that the best I could do was what I’d been doing all along: make a big stink and a lot of noise and let other people take care of the bits they were good at.

  Which would have been easier if it wasn’t for all this lawsuit business. The solicitor that 26’s stepdad found for me was a young and eager type, in his midtwenties, named Gregory. I thought he was Chinese, but it turned out he was Malaysian, though he spoke posher English than I did. He was busily filing all sorts of papers with the court, and he rang me up every day to explain it all to me, and let me tell you, if the Parliament and Lords business was complicated, it was nothing next to this rot. I’d get ahold of a thread and feel like it was making sense, and then I’d lose track of it all.

  But there was one thing that absolutely got my attention: “They want to get an injunction barring you from using the Internet until the trial,” Gregory said. He insisted on talking on the phone—no IM, no email—because apparently phone calls had some kind of special legal status when you were talking to a solicitor and if someone were to wiretap us, it would go very hard on them. I kept trying to explain that we could just use encrypted VoIP or IM or even email, which would be impossible to wiretap (and not just illegal), but he had his way of doing things and wouldn’t change them for a kid like me. So I bought loads of prepaid airtime minutes for my mobile and took notes on my lappie.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” I said.

  “It means you won’t be able to use the net for at least a month. It’ll keep you offline until the TIP-Ex vote’s gone past.”

  “Bugger,” I said. “Do you think they’ll get it?” I was bothered, but not insanely so. So what if I couldn’t post as Cecil B. DeVil or Trent McCauley? I’d just read the net through our little bootleg connection and have someone else type up replies from me. It’d be a pain, but nothing terminal.

  He sighed. “I think they might. Now, Trent, I know you’re thinking that you’ll be able to sneak online but I want you to understand what that would mean. Right now, you’re facing a civil suit. As you know, there’s not much bad that can happen to you no matter how it turns out—you haven’t got any money, so even if they win a giant judgment off you, they’ll never collect. But if the court orders you to do something—like stay off the Internet—and you don’t do it, you’ll be in contempt of court. That’s not a civil problem, it’s a criminal one, and the judge can and will stick you in jail for it. What’s more, once you’ve been done on a criminal charge, the coppers get all sort of license to go scrounging around on your hard drive to see what else they might find. I’m sure there’s some clever bugger over at one of the motion picture studios who’s gone, ‘Hang on, this Cecil kid is absolutely mad for the net. Why don’t we get the judge to suspend his network access, wait for him to do something stupid, and then bang him up for contempt, search his computer, and find a bunch more reasons to do him over. As a bonus, we’ll crack open his email and find out which of his mates we can get at, too, see if there’s anything that looks like a confession of wrongdoing. Maybe he’s skint, but some of his chums’ll have parents with lovely houses and cars and that that we can get off them. He’ll have a lot fewer friends once his little games get all his friends’ families turned into paupers.’ Are you following me on this one?”

  I shook my head. “Fine,” I said, feeling glum and self-pitying. I comforted myself with the knowledge that they’d never get anything off my computer, not with my encrypted hard drive.

  “You’re thinking about your computer’s encryption, yeah?” Gregory said. He was such a sharp one.

  “You’re a mind-reader, then?”

  “Let’s just say you’re not the first young man of my acquaintance who’s got himself into trouble with a computer. I’m perfectly willing to stipulate that you can lock up your hard drive with fiendishly clever ciphers that His Majesty’s best will never crack open. Allow me to quote a brief passage from Section 53 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, a gripping read from start to finish, by the way: ‘A person to whom a section 49 notice’—that is, you, once the law tells you to hand over your password—‘has been given is guilty of an offense if he knowingly fails, in accordance with the notice, to make the disclosure required by virtue of the giving of the notice.’ Tumpty tumpty tumpty, for the purposes of, sufficient evidence, etc and so forth, yes, here it is! ‘A person guilty of an offense under this section shall be liable on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum, or to both.’

  “You follow that, o client mine? The law can order you to turn over your passwords, crypto keys, and all the other clevernesses you’ve got stashed in that young, foolish head of yours. If you don’t do so in a prompt and cooperative manner, well, they bang you up for six months. Fancy half a year in jail?”

  “No,” I muttered, feeling all boxed in.

  “Thought not. So don’t be clever. They haven’t won the injunction yet, and I’m sure your barrister will fight it like the vicious bulldog I know him to be. But if he loses, you are to comply with the order with extreme punctiliousness. Not because I expect you to have much respect for the law. To be frank, the law is my life and some mornings I don’t have much respect for it myself. No, because if you fail to comply, you will be putting your head in the jaws of a large, deadly bear trap that these smart fellows have laid in your path, and I’d much prefer you to live to a ripe old age without getting your noggin crushed within the law’s inexorable maw. Are we both very clear on this?”

  “Clear as perspex,” I said.

  He clucked his tongue. “It’s not me you should be getting arsey with. I didn’t put you in this position, and I’m doing my utmost to get you out of it, even though I’m not getting a groat for my time. If it’s any comfort, at least know that someone very clever and expensive has been paid many, many thousand of pounds to think this one up, which means that you’ve really upset someone. Whatever you’re doing, it’s got some rich and powerful people scared.”

  That cheered me some. “That’s not a bad way of looking at it.”

  “There you go. So keep your pecker up, stiff upper lip, all that business. I’ll come back to you once we’ve got a court date for the injunction. Stay out of trouble until then, right?”

  “Right,” I said. He hung up before I could add, “Thanks.” That was just like him—everything seemed to be part of some viciously competitive game he was playing against himself, or maybe against the whole world, and he wasn’t really one for the niceties. I reckoned I understood that somewhat, as there were days when I felt a bit of it myself.

  But seeing as I had some time before I was coming before the court, and seeing as how I’d just had the fear put into me, I thought it prudent to do something to protect my pals if the worst happened. The thing was, locking up your hard drive wasn’t that hard, but most of the time it was obvious that you’d fiddled things—anyone who knew what to look for could tell in a s
econd that you’d encrypted the lot. For years I’d used some clever stuff called TrueCrypt that had a ”plausible deniability” mode that was pretty fiendish.

  TrueCrypt let you set up part or all of your hard drive as an encrypted file. After booting the computer, you needed to enter the password to mount the disk. But if someone knowledgeable looked at the disk, it’d be totally obvious that there was an encrypted TrueCrypt blob sitting on it.

  But the clever bit was this: TrueCrypt let you set up a second, hidden file within that blob. If you entered one password, you’d just see the “outer” disk. But enter a second password at the same time and you’d get an entirely different disk. And this disk was practically invisible: there was no way to look at the encrypted outer file and say that there was another disk hiding in it. If you had a good “inner disk” password, no one would be able to prove that it was there. Which meant that if someone—say, a representative of His Majesty’s government—decided to force me to give up my password, I could cheerfully give them the “outer” password and insist that no inner password existed and they’d never be able to prove otherwise.

  But I figured that if it ever came to that, no one was going to believe that I didn’t have an inner, hidden disk. I mean, of course I’d use one! Even if I had nothing to hide, I’d do it because it was so flipping, deadly cool to have a little spy-drive all to my own.

  The TrueCrypt boffins had thought of this, of course. So they’d recently shipped a new version that had room for a third inner layer inside the “deniable” partition—so you’d have to enter a password, and then another password, and then another password. You could go all the way down if you wanted, five or six layers deep. My solicitor was a clever-clogs and he was quite right that it would go hard for me if I got into a position where I had to give up my password and refused to give it. But as usual, the technology was running half a mile ahead of the law. After all, what could the coppers do, bang you in jail because you’d given them password after password and they hadn’t found anything, and therefore you must still be hiding something?