Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

  “Every time I passed by, I stopped to look at it and appreciate it. Then, one day, one of the estate agents came out, a big mucker in a camel-hair coat and shiny shoes and a silk scarf, and he said, ‘You’re always staring at that, hey? It’s nice. You can hardly tell that all that stuff isn’t real.’

  “As soon as he said it, I could see it—every plate, every spoon and fork, they were all made of plastic. No one had excavated all this junk from a charity shop and made something brilliant out of it. They’d just sent off to China for a bunch of premade, injection-molded rubbish, just like you would if you wanted a load of plastic Christmas trees or artificial flowers. And though it was still pretty, it wasn’t anything like the miracle I’d thought it was. It was just a clever little toy, not a work of art.

  “When I make a film by finding real parts lying around, waiting to be shifted and shunted and twisted into place to make something new, it feels real. Like I’ve done something that no one else could quite make. When I started using a bit of computer generated stuff to fill in around the edges, it felt like a real cheat and it took me ages to get comfortable with it. Every now and again, I think about maybe making a film with a camera and that, but it just seems like if I did that, I’d have to get so many other people to cooperate with me, get the actors to say the lines the way I want them to, get the set designers to make the sets that I want them to make.… Well, it just feels like it’d be so much bother, if that makes sense.”

  “I can’t say I ever thought of it that way, but I suppose it makes some sense after all,” she said. She looked at the time on her computer screen. “Whoops! That’s time. It was a real pleasure to meet you, Mr. DeVil. Now, did I understand that you were thinking that you might use some of those clips of Grandad in some new films?”

  “Oh!” I said hastily, “yes, well, only if you don’t mind, I mean—”

  “Stop,” she said. “No, I don’t mind in the slightest. It just never occurred to me that you’d think of those clips as footage. They’re just, well, memories for me. I think it’d be marvelous if you gave them a second life in one of your creations. Yes, please do.”

  I almost hugged her. I settled for shaking her hand and tripping out of the office on a cloud. I didn’t even mind when an errant green laser from some tourist’s mosquito-zapper caught me just below my eye, giving me a little scorch. The tourist—an American girl who was quite pretty, though badly dressed—was very apologetic and made a little show of fawning over me, which was rather nice, and well worth the minor burn.

  * * *

  Gregory the solicitor had put the fear of the law in me, and so I refrained from posting my new Scot clip—the one I’d shared with his actual granddaughter, who’d shook my actual hand!—even though I was busting to show it around. Instead, I spent the week going to TIP-Ex rallies, taking coaches and trains all over England and Wales to attend the local rallies and shake hands and make little speeches. A TIP-Ex campaigner from the Green Party had heard me griping about not being able to afford the travel to get to these events and he’d bought me a month-long rail pass out of his own pocket, and I was determined to make it worth his while by going to as many of the bloody things as I could get to.

  It was well worth it, too. I’d be in Milton Keynes one day, and I’d meet some little gang of media hackers who needed help getting inside the Open University to campaign there, and the next day I’d meet an OU prof at a demo in Loughborough and I’d pass on her details to the Milton Keynes crowd. I found that I was building up a mental database of people who needed to meet other people and so I created a message board on Confusing Peach, which had gone public and turned into a hub for the movement. But even with the message board, I was still always finding people who didn’t know that they needed to meet someone, or hadn’t thought of it. It got so I’d be dozing on a long coach ride and I’d be jolted awake by the realization that this guy really needed to talk to that guy right away and I’d whip out my lappie and start sending round emails.

  I missed 26 like fire, of course, but it was better this way: she was revising like mad for her A levels, and finishing off her last papers, and arguing with her parents about what uni she should go to next year. (She was lobbying to take a year or two off to work and save money and generally arse around and figure out what she wanted from life, which sounded eminently sensible to me. Her parents disagreed.)

  I came back to London at 2:00 A.M. the night before the hearing on my injunction. I’d found a passable suit—five years out of date, but approximately my size, and not entirely horrible—in the £1 bin at the Age Concern charity shop next to the Manchester train station, and I figured I could hang it up in the Zeroday’s bathroom while I showered to steam out the worst of the wrinkles before I went to the court.

  Jem and Rabid Dog were watching a video on Dog’s laptop in the front room when I got in, all bundled up in blankets and cuddling. A couple months before, I’d have been embarrassed for them—or for me—but I’d stayed on so many sofas and floors in the past couple weeks that I was beyond embarrassment. Besides, these were my chums and they were making each other damned happy, so what kind of bastard would I have to be to object to that?

  “The prodigal son,” Jem said, as I stumbled in, rucksack on my back, clutching the carrier bag holding my court suit. “How were the crusades, then?”

  I flopped down on the other sofa, which, for all its smelly horribleness, was still an absolute delight of familiar homeyness. “I’m beat, lads. Got to be in court in eight hours, too. It was an amazing time, but Christ, I feel like I’ve been beaten with sticks. Big ones, with nails through them.”

  Dog snorted. “No you don’t,” he said.

  I waved at him. “Yeah, no I don’t. Poetic license. No offense meant.” As far as I knew, he was all healed from his beating, but his nose would never look the same again, and he had some new scars I’d noticed when he was making a dash from the shower to his bedroom. But the beat-down had changed him, made him a little less playful, a little more militant. Jem had told me that Dog figured if he was going to get gay-bashed, he might as well stop pretending he wasn’t gay. That made a certain sense to me.

  “Well, there’s some concentrated cold-brew coffee in the fridge,” Jem said. “Experimental batch. Strong stuff. Help yourself tomorrow, but go easy. It’s the kind of stuff that might make your heart explode if you get too much in you.”

  “You, sir, are a scientist and an angel of mercy,” I said, hauling myself off the sofa and starting up the stairs, noticing that they were dusty and dirty. It had been my month to do the floors, according to the chores rota. Just one more thing to do after this stupid court business.

  I set two alarms—one on my lappie and one on my phone—and set them halfway across the room so I’d have to get up to get to them. Then I slept like the dead.

  * * *

  Jem hadn’t been kidding about the cold-brew coffee. I’d had a milk-glass full of the stuff, eight or ten ounces, and had briefly entertained having a second, but I decided to just get a move on and dash for the bus. By the time we entered Shoreditch, I felt like all the small muscles in my feet and hands were contracting and releasing in waves, and it felt like my ears were sweating. I was very glad I hadn’t had a second coffee!

  Gregory met me outside the courthouse. He was wearing a much smarter suit than mine, and he shook my hand warmly, then led me inside, through a metal detector and security check, and then into a crowded room filled with various coppers, fixers, and crims like me, looking uncomfortable in their suits or miserable with their weeping families. There were also loads of men and women in long black robes and ridiculous wigs. At first I thought they were all judges, and then I realized that one of them was 26’s stepfather, and he was headed straight for us.

  He shook my hand distractedly, then caught me staring at his wig and smiled wryly. “You see what we have to do, we poor barristers? Don’t worry, I won’t be wearing it for your hearing; I’ve just come from a full-dress drama, a
bit of housebreaking. Proper villains. Not like your sort, Cecil. It’s such a waste of everyone’s time to send you through the system for a bit of downloading, when there’s people accused of real crimes waiting to be tried.”

  I wondered if I should defend my honor by insisting that I was every bit the hardened bad guy, just as much as any of these arsonists, robbers, housebreakers, and murderers, but decided on balance that I preferred “harmless” over “convict.”

  “Right, this should be very simple and straightforward,” Roshan took off his wig and robe and handed them to a porter behind a counter. “It’s Dutta,” he said to the porter. “Second from the left.” Then he turned back to me without waiting for a response. “Simple. We go in, we explain that it’s altogether too onerous to order you to stay offline because you can’t possibly prepare a defense or work on your lobbying efforts without a network connection. You’ve got your list of recent appearances, yes?”

  I nodded and waved my phone at him. “I don’t have a printer at home, but I’ve got it here. News clippings, too, just like you asked.”

  He said, “Fine, we’ll go to a client room and use a printer there. Got to have paper, so the clerk can then scan it all in again.” He clucked his tongue and hustled away, while we followed in his wake. It was wonderful to see him in his element—it gave me real confidence in his skill as a barrister. At home, Roshan was just 26’s stepfather, kindly, funny, a little vague sometimes. But here, he was utterly switched on, radiating competence and cleverness. I was damned glad to have him on my side.

  I followed the networking instructions on a curling piece of paper taped to the printer and got my phone hooked up to it and my papers printed seconds before a bailiff gave a thump on the doorframe, and said, “You’re up, Mr. Dutta,” before hurrying off to another errand. I realized that the business with the old printer had completely taken my mind off the upcoming hearing and calmed me right down. I pushed away the anxiety that wanted to come back now that it was on my mind again, and took a deep breath as I stepped into the courtroom.

  There was already a hearing in progress, something about a dispute between a landlord and a motorcycle courier firm that had been evicted from a building. The landlord had kidnapped all the company’s effects and that and changed the locks. The judge asked each barrister a few pointed questions, shut them up when they tried to blather on about stuff he hadn’t asked about, and then told the landlord to let the couriers come get their stuff, then ordered the couriers to pay their rent owing or they’d have to answer to him. He was ginger-haired beneath his wig—I could tell by the eyebrows and freckles—and about fifty. He had big droopy bags under his eyes, like a sad cartoon dog, and a long straight nose that he wiggled around when he talked. I decided I liked him.

  Then it was our turn. Roshan got to his feet, and said basically the same thing we’d discussed before: it was unfair and prejudicial to my case to bar me from using the net, and it would dramatically curtail my ability to campaign for the repeal of a law that had given a great commercial advantage to the claimants—just what I thought he’d say. The judge listened intently, made a few notes, then settled his chin in his hand and listened some more. At one point, he looked me up and down and up again, and I felt like he was wearing X-ray specs. It was all I could do not to squirm under the gaze of his big, watery eyes, but I held still and met his stare and gave him a little smile. That seemed to satisfy him, because he went back to staring at 26’s stepdad.

  Then it was the other side’s turn. Their lawyer made a big deal out of the number of legal claims that had been laid against me and called me a “compulsive thief” who “could not seem to stop downloading, no matter what the stakes.” It was for this reason that he wanted the judge to shut me down, because unless I was cut off from the Internet, I’d carry on with my single-handed epidemic of downloading and copying. If I hadn’t felt enough of a villain before, now I felt too much of one. They made me sound like a maniac who pirated everything and anything. It would have been funny if it didn’t make me want to crap my pants with terror.

  I kept my face neutral, but Roshan scowled with theatric ferocity as the studios’ lawyer maligned me at great length. When it was his turn to rebut, he climbed to his feet and shook his head slowly.

  “That was some performance,” Roshan said. “And it was a rather fine example of the flights of fancy for which my learned friend’s clients are so justly famed. But it had as much to do with reality, or, indeed, the law, as a courtroom drama. My client is a young man who stands accused of selectively downloading short clips for the purpose of making acclaimed transformational works that act as commentary and parody, and which constitute rather impressive creative works in their own rights. He is, fundamentally, a competitor of the claimants. They may paint him as an uncontrollable menace to society, but what business magnate would characterize his competition any differently? Indeed, my client has voluntarily suspended all of his filmmaking activities for the duration of this proceeding, which means a court order would be redundant in any event—and only serve to cut my client off from activities that are unequivocally lawful, such as lobbying (rather effectively) for the repeal of legislation that is particularly favorable to the claimants. I believe it is improper for the claimants to ask this court to remove their legislative opponents from the field by means of hysterical and stilted characterizations of his activities.”

  He sat down. I wanted to cheer, but I knew better. But he’d been brilliant, and I could tell that the judge thought so, too—he was controlling his grin, but you could see the tightness in the corners of his eyes and mouth where he was holding it in.

  But the prosecution lawyer was grinning, too, and as he got to his feet, I could see that he wasn’t the least bit worried, which suggested that he was still confident. He said, “Your Honor, can you please ask the court clerk to retrieve a video file I have just attached to the docket?”

  Roshan shot to his feet. “Excuse me,” he said firmly. “Your Honor, as my learned friend has not seen fit to make this evidence available prior to this proceeding—”

  The prosecution lawyer nodded. “Terribly sorry,” he said, “but it couldn’t be helped. Only just came into our possession, you see. It’s quite germane, as I think you’ll see.”

  The judge cocked his head, then nodded at a woman sitting to one side and below him, in her own little wooden box. She moused around a bit, and a flat-panel screen beside the bench lit up and began to play a video.

  My video.

  The Scot video I’d made but not released, the piss-take on the anti-piracy warnings at the start of the films. The video I’d only given to one person: Dr. Katarina McGregor-Colford. The video I wasn’t supposed to have made at all. The video, in fact, that my legal team had specifically instructed me not to make.

  It played through and ended with two and a half seconds of credits, prominently ascribing authorship to Cecil B. DeVil.

  All the blood in my upper torso had plunged into my stomach, and all the blood below there had filled my feet, rooting me to the spot, leaving me swaying lightly like an inflatable clown punching bag. Roshan and Gregory were both staring at me, one on either side. I couldn’t meet their stares, so I looked straight ahead at the judge, who wasn’t even bothering to hide his snigger. He dabbed at his eyes with the billowing black sleeves of his robe and composed himself.

  “Did you make this, young man?”

  It was the first remark anyone in the courtroom had directed at me. I cleared my throat, and croaked, “Yes, Your Honor.”

  He nodded. “When did you make it?”

  “I finished that cut about ten days ago, Your Honor.”

  The judge consulted the papers before him. “That was, well, two weeks after you were served with notice of this suit?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “I see.” He drummed his fingers. “Could we see that again, please?”

  A giggle rippled through the courtroom, and turned into a little cheer. The
judge raised a finger once without looking away from the screen, and there was instant silence. The clerk clicked her mouse and the video ran once more. This time, there was audible laughter from the observers in the court. I snuck a look at the studios’ barrister and saw his sour expression, like he’d just bit into something rotten. He clearly didn’t see the humor.

  The video finished and the judge put his chin back in his hand for a moment. Then he straightened up. “Mr. Dutta?”

  “Your Honor, I would like a moment to confer with my client, if you would be so kind.”

  “I expect you would. Go on, then.”

  Roshan leaned in and whispered to me, “What is this, Cecil?” He sounded mad.

  “I didn’t release it,” I said. “It leaked. It was just something I was working on in private.” I shrugged. It sounded stupid and reckless when I said it aloud. I shut my mouth before I said anything stupider.

  The judge studied his notes for a good long while, as the moments oozed past and my blood hammered at my eardrums. Then he nodded, and said, “Right, well, I suppose that about says it all, doesn’t it? Young man, I don’t mind telling you that I believe you to be a very talented filmmaker. It also sounds to me like you’ve got a legitimate grievance with this Theft of Intellectual Property Act, and you and your colleagues are certainly doing a good job of pressing your case.”

  I almost jumped on the spot. He was going to let me off. He had to let me off.

  “Nevertheless, the existence of this video and your own admissions relating to the timeline of its creation are a clear indication that the claimants aren’t simply going for dramatic effect when they characterize your somewhat compulsive relationship with their copyrights. In light of that, I’m afraid you’re going to have to get used to life without the Internet until this case has been heard in detail. This court orders you to abstain from use of the Internet for any purpose for a period of two weeks, or until your suits are ruled upon, whichever comes first.”