Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32

by Judith Berman

  Speaking of going after people tooth and nail, that brings us to your new novel, Pirate Cinema. What’s that about?

  Pirate Cinema was inspired by a legislative event in the United Kingdom, where I live. In 2009, they introduced legislation called the Digital Economy Act, which includes something called “three strikes,” which says that if you’re accused—without proof—of three acts of copyright infringement, you and your family get disconnected from the internet.

  This legislation was introduced right around the same time we had a report from our champion for digital inclusion, a woman named Martha Lane Fox, whose government posting is to make sure that everybody in the country has access to the internet. She commissioned a Price Waterhouse Cooper study into a follow-up of a trial program where people who lived in government housing—in very vulnerable populations in the north, where the local economy and industry have collapsed—they followed it up to see what happened when those people were given internet access and compared them to their neighbors who hadn’t been given internet access, so they had a naturally occurring control population experiment that they could use to analyze the impact of internet access.

  They found that for these people who had been given internet access, everything we use to measure the quality of life went up for them. Their kids not only got better grades, but they were more likely to go on to post-secondary education and to be socially mobile. The parents got better jobs and had more disposable income, and so there was better nutrition, and their health outcomes were better. They were less socially isolated, they were more civically engaged, and more politically engaged. Really the whole raft of human experience improves when you give people internet access, so it follows that when you take away people’s internet access, you confiscate those benefits too.

  It’s bad enough to say, “If you watch TV the wrong way we’re going to take away your access to civic engagement, education, employment, and health.” But it’s even worse to say, “If you live in the same house as someone who is the named subscriber for a DSL modem that has been accused—without proof—of being involved in someone—possibly not even someone who lives in your house—watching TV the wrong way, we’re going to take away all these benefits.” This was just wildly disproportionate and really just evil.

  It passed without debate because they snuck it into the final session of Parliament, just before they dissolved the Parliament for the election. And it had passed in other countries in the same way. In New Zealand, the way that they passed it was as a rider to the Christchurch earthquake bailout, the bill that was passed to free up resources to help save the people dying in the rubble of Christchurch. They snuck it in there.

  This made me so furious that I decided I would write a book about it. So I wrote this novel called Pirate Cinema, and it’s about a kid who lives in one of these northern towns, these rust belt towns, a town called Bradford that was once the center of the textiles industry. His name is Trent, but he calls himself “Cecil B. DeVil” after Cecil B. DeMille, the movie producer, because he makes movies. But he doesn’t make movies the way they did in Spielberg’s era, where they had Super 8 cameras, like that Spielberg movie. He doesn’t make them the way they did in my boyhood, with VHS cameras. He makes them the way that you can if you’re a kid in the 21st century, namely by downloading other people’s movies and recutting them, and making new movies out of them.

  And he’s very good at it, and it totally consumes him, and people love what he does and it’s very popular, and like many consumed, passionate adolescents, he gets careless, and he forgets to use the proxy that hides his internet identity from the snoopers that are used to catch pirates and disconnect them. And so his family gets disconnected, and his dad loses his job, and his mom loses her disability benefits, and his sister can no longer get the grades that she was getting and probably won’t make it into university, and so he’s really effectively destroyed his family.

  And he runs away to London, the way the hero of so many British novels do, and he joins a gang—a kind of “ha ha only serious” youth gang of anarchist freegan squatters—who make their own movies and show them in underground movie theaters, not just “underground” in the sense that they are all on the down low, and you have to know who to ask, and it’s all with a wink and a nudge, but “underground” in the sense that they break into beautiful vaulted brick Victorian sewers and turn them into cinemas—pirate cinemas—and these screenings become a citywide and then a nationwide phenomenon—everyone’s doing them, everyone’s making their own movies.

  But even though they think that they can no longer engage with the law, that they can just ignore the law, what they discover is that just because they’re not interested in the law doesn’t mean that the law won’t take an interest in them, and very soon the law’s gotten much worse, to the point where people are going to jail just for downloading. When I wrote that, that was science fiction, but two or three weeks ago, Japan passed legislation which says that if you download copyright-infringing material, you can go to jail for two years. Which effectively means that if you click the wrong link on Youtube, you go to prison. Japan also provides for ten years in prison if you upload copyright-infringing material.

  And so as these laws get worse, Trent and his friends decide that what they’re going to do is actually prevent new laws from being passed, and that the way that they’re going to do that is by bankrupting the entertainment industry with systematic piracy. So rather than just pirating things in a slapdash way, they’re going to pirate the things that cost the movie industry as much money as possible. So when new movies open, they’re walking up and down the ticket line in Leicester Square—which is kind of our answer to Times Square—and walking up to people in line to buy the ticket to the premiere screening, and they are handing them SD cards with copies of the movie on it, and a note that says, “If you buy a ticket, they’re just going to use the money to screw up our country. Here’s a copy of the movie, go watch it at home, make your own mixes, and come show them at one of our showings.” And, you know, jailarity ensues, because clearly the entertainment industry isn’t going to take that lying down, and that’s when the novel really starts to kick off.

  And I understand that these underground showings are an actual phenomenon, and you attended some of them?

  Yeah, there are underground showings, the pirate cinema movement is real, and I was in a pirate cinema in a squatted pub in East London, much like Zeroday, the pub that Trent and his friends live in. One of the people who lived there, Jamie King—who founded a novel distribution company called Vodo that distributes science fiction movies online—he actually was a great source for information on the ins and outs of squatting in London, and some of the stories of what happens to these squatters were taken right from his life story.

  So this is a book that could be seen as glorifying teenage runaways, premarital sex, trespassing, recreational drug use, and computer crimes. Did you get any pushback on that, or have any misgivings about including any of that?

  I certainly haven’t had any pushback. This is a book about a kid who lives in an unjust society and who tries a variety of strategies to deal with it—some of them smart, some of them not smart—and in some cases doing the not-smart thing ends up getting him into a lot of trouble, which I think is true to life, and in the spirit of a lot of good Young Adult literature. So I’m not at all bothered about it. Some of it is presented as romantic, but none of the stuff that I think of as a bad idea is presented as a good idea. It’s just presented as the kind of thing that a 17-year-old who is really upset might do.

  Do you ever get letters from kids who have been inspired by your books to become hacker anarchists?

  Yeah, all the time—at least to become hackers, and political activists. My first Young Adult novel Little Brother had an afterword with a bibliography for kids who want to get involved in learning how security works, learning how computers work, learning how to program them, learning how to take them apart, learning how to s
olve their problems with technology as well as with politics. And the number of kids who have written to me and said that they became programmers after reading that, I couldn’t even count them. I’ve had similar responses to my second Young Adult novel, For the Win, and I’ve also heard from kids who’ve read Pirate Cinema. In fact, we published an editorial by one of them on Boing Boing—an anonymous reader who makes her own movies out of Japanese anime, and who talked about what drives her and how the book resonated with her.

  Do any of those fans have websites?

  For Little Brother, if you go to craphound.com/littlebrother and just click on the remixes tab, there’s a whole ton of these that I’ve collected over the years.

  So in Pirate Cinema, the protagonist Trent writes, “I realized that the press always asks the same questions, so I’d just plop down on the sofa with my laptop and my headset and take the call while Jem fed me so much jet fuel it was a race to see whether I could finish the interview before I attained lift off and sailed into gabbling, babbling coffee orbit.” Is that how you actually do interviews?

  [laughs] A little bit. I mean, my friend Steve Gould, who wrote the novel Jumper, which became the not-very-good movie Jumper, went on a press tour when the movie came out, and he’s said the reason it’s called a “press” tour is because it’s like being pressed between two boards. And it is true that most of the questions are the same, but I don’t mind answering them because I find that talking about the stuff helps me think it through. It’s a productive task for me.

  I do actually really dislike writing out the same answers over and over again. For some reason, typing the same block of text twice feels remarkably wasteful in a way that saying the same thing twice doesn’t. Maybe because if you say it a lot it gets better, because you can inflect it better, and you can practice it. Whereas if you type the same thing over and over again, I don’t think you get better at it. I mean, maybe you get better at typing, but you don’t get better at expressing the underlying ideas.

  So I’ve often thought that what I might do for the so-called email interviews—which I just hate, I hate the kind of “Well, I’ve just got a few quick questions for you,” and the quick questions are questions that are quick to type but not quick to respond to, like “What is art?” or “What is virtue?” or “How should the world be governed?” I mean, that is a very quick question, but not necessarily a quick question to answer—I’ve often thought that what I might do is take all the questions I’ve been asked before in writing and just post them on a public page, and whenever anyone asks to email interview me, say, “You may ask me two questions that aren’t in this list. You can use this list as much as you like, and you can ask me two more, but with the understanding that as soon as I answer them for you, I’m going to add them to that page.” Because it just seems to me that a lot of email interviews, the real underlying pitch is, “Will you write me five short essays that I can publish under my byline?”

  Well, and what you just described is what Trent does in the novel.

  Yeah, well, if it’s a good idea in real life, it’s a good idea to beta test in fiction.

  So you just wrapped up your book tour. Do you have any funny stories from the tour that you want to share?

  I’m trying to think of any particularly funny stories. I mean, I’ve had funny road stories before. I got interviewed once when I was on tour with For the Win. I was in San Francisco, and I had an interview scheduled at 5 a.m. with a British newspaper. My friend Aleks Krotoski was writing for the Independent in London—and obviously 5 a.m. on the West Coast is a reasonable hour in London. I’d had room service bring up breakfast, and I had to get dressed while I was talking to her, because I had to get out of the hotel right after we were done and go to the airport, and so I answered her Skype call sitting down at my desk—still not dressed—and she said, “You’re naked.” And I went, “Shit! The camera is on.”

  I was at the desk, so you just saw sort of halfway up my chest and up. It wasn’t anything that you wouldn’t see on a beach, certainly, and it wasn’t anything particularly embarrassing, except that I’d answered the video phone naked, essentially. And so I went and turned the camera off. And I kept walking around the room, and getting dressed, and eating my breakfast, and answering her questions, and carrying the laptop around as I did.

  And then I was finally dressed, and I’d eaten my breakfast and was finishing up the interview, and I sat down again and put the laptop down again and looked, and the camera light was still on. And I said, “Aleks, has the camera been on the whole time?” And she said, “Yeah, I didn’t want to embarrass you.” And I’m like, “You could have just told me.” [laughs] And again, she’s a very good friend. She’s a good friend of my wife’s. She stayed over at our place. She’s seen me get out of the bathroom with a towel around my waist, and I’m sure she didn’t see anything much ruder than that. But it was a bit embarrassing.

  And then the other one was, I did a signing in Austin. And I think it was also on a For the Win tour. And a guy came up, and I said, “So what can I write in your book?” And he said, “Drama hobbit.” And I said, “Drama hobbit?” And he said, “Yeah, drama hobbit.” And I was like, “Really?” And he was like, “Drama hobbit.” And so I drew this “drama hobbit,” a hobbit that was very dramatic—a little guy with a pointy hat and pointy ears and furry feet and a kind of knife, and he had drama lines coming out of him, which in hindsight probably looked a bit like stink lines.

  And I handed the book to him and he said, “What’s that?” and I said, “It’s a drama hobbit.” And he said, “No, no, no. Draw Mohammed.” It was “Draw Mohammed Week,” and it was during the Danish cartoon thing. But so I’ve always wanted to do a “Drama Hobbit Week” where everybody draws the most dramatic hobbits they can, but I’ve yet to convince anyone else that it would be a good idea.

  You have a new nonfiction book coming out called Information Doesn’t Want to be Free. You want to tell us about that?

  Sure. I mean, my agent has just started to get offers on it—because he just started shopping it—and I haven’t heard much from him because he lives in New Jersey and has no power or water or heat, and has been talking about barbequing his cats, but as far as I know the sales process is in the offing and the book will be out at some point. It’s a short business book about copyright, and it’s meant to be three sensible things that you can take into your understanding of copyright as you structure your business around the digital age.

  The first thing is that if you let someone else put a lock on your file, and if that person doesn’t give you the key, that lock can’t be there for your benefit. That lock will eventually be used against you. And so, for example, Apple and Audible won’t allow you to sell audiobooks without their DRM on it—without their digital lock on it. And because it’s illegal to remove a digital lock, what that’s really doing is tying all of your customers, as someone who makes audiobooks, to their platform.

  And so if later on someone has a better platform, what you are doing is guessing or hoping or betting that all the people who have ever bought your audiobooks in the old platform follow you to the new one, even though it means maintaining two separate library management tools, or else throwing away all their old audiobooks, including the ones you sold them. So as someone who invests in making this media, if you’re a publisher or studio or a newspaper or a record label, you really need to focus on making sure that you’re not handing control over your business to a company who doesn’t really contribute to the business, they just put locks on it.

  The next piece of advice is that although fame won’t make you rich, you can’t get rich in the arts without fame. On the one hand there are lots of people whose works have been widely downloaded and who didn’t make any money from it, but all the people who made money in the arts made money by being widely known to their audiences. And the internet allows us to have all kinds of paths to have our work discovered and shared among audiences, and promoted within those audiences. It�
�s still up to us to figure out how to turn that into money, but without the fame you don’t even have the opportunity to do that.

  And the copyright laws that the entertainment industry has been agitating for—particularly the ones that make it more expensive to operate any of these services like Blogger or Google or Facebook or Youtube, because they require that you pay unimaginable armies of lawyers to make sure that nothing uploaded infringes on copyright—that what those end up doing is putting independent distribution and independent audience discovery outside of the reach of individual artists, such that you always have to sign up with a label or a studio or a publisher to get a decent deal, or to reach an audience at all, and that when they control all of the distribution channels and all the audience discovery and audience interaction channels, that they can basically command incredibly abusive terms from the artists that they deal with. And so it’s really in artists’ interests that the intermediaries—the people who sit between us and our audiences—have low barriers to entry, so that they’re continuously being disrupted and there are lots of new businesses entering all the time and vying for our business.

  And then the third one is that information doesn’t want to be free but people do, and that when we focus on the question of “information” when we make internet policy, instead of recognizing—as you see in Pirate Cinema—that the internet is really fundamentally about everything that we do in the 21st century—not just how we entertain ourselves—that we end up putting everyone at risk. That designing devices, for example, to prevent copying involves designing devices that hide things from their users. You can’t design a device that when you say, “Copy the file please, HAL,” it says, “I can’t let you do that, Dave,”—you can’t design that device in a way that’s effective if there’s a program called “HAL 9000” on the desktop that you can just drag into the trash. So it has to be able to hide programs and processes from users.