Pirate Cinema (22 page)

The office of every MP who took the day off work was flooded with calls from angry voters, but as Annika pointed out, they didn't really have to worry, most of them, since there wasn't anyone to vote for in their constituency who would have come out against the bill, not with their party's whips out and enforcing order.

Within a week of the law coming into effect, they had their first arrest. Jimmy Preston, the kid they took away, had some kind of mental problems -- autistic spectrum, they said on the BBC -- and he didn't go out much. But he'd collected 450,000 songs on his hard drive through endless, tedious, tireless hours of downloading. From what anyone could tell, he didn't even listen to them: he just liked cataloging them, correcting their metadata, organizing them. I recognized the motivation, having spent many comforting evenings tidying up and sorting out my multi-terabyte collection of interesting video clips (many of which I'd never even watched, but wanted to have handy in case they were needed for one of my projects). He had collected most of them before the law came into effect, but TIP also made it a crime to possess the files.

Six months later, the sentencing judge gave him five years in prison, the last year adult prison after he turned twenty-one -- because the Crown showed that his collection was valued at over
twenty million
pounds! -- and the media was filled with pictures of this scared-eyed seventeen-year-old kid in a bad-fitting suit, his teary parents hovering over his shoulder, faces pulled into anguished masks.

But he didn't serve five years. They found him hanging from the light fixture in his cell two weeks later. His cellmates claimed they hadn't noticed him climbing up on the steel toilet with a rope made from a twisted shirt around his neck, hadn't noticed as he kicked and choked and gurgled out his last breath. The rumor was that his body was covered in bruises from the beatings he'd received from the other prisoners. Jimmy didn't deal well with prison. We all got to know his name then -- until then, they'd kept it a secret because he was a minor -- and he went from being Mr. X to Dead Jimmy.

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, fecking 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 one another 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? Pissing 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. Fight. 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.

"Okay, fine. But I want to go to war now. No more complaining. No more campaigning. Time to do something
real
.

Hell yeah! Trent's got a plan! He's a man of action! He's bold! He's ready to make a move! And so are you, right?

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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 zillions 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 space-ships 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 half-way 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:

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 school kids 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 eighteen 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 Eighteen, 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 Eighteen 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 kind 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 thirty-two 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?"

"Fine," he said. "But what about one or two films?"

Durr. There it was, staring me in the face. If you wanted to distribute just a couple of films, at very high resolution, with four or five audio-tracks and some additional material, thirty-two gigs was
plenty
. They'd rattle around with all the space left over. And that's when the plan came together.

Aziz not only had a thousand thumb-drives; he also had a shelf full of bulk-writers for them, ones that would take fifty at a time and let you write a disk-image to all of them at once. We packaged up the leaked copy of Part Eighteen along with a couple hundred of the best piss-takes from Cynical April, along with a little video that we all worked on together, piecing it together using the dialog from the actual film and its earlier parts, cutting in one word at a time to have a blur of actors explain:

"When you go to see terrible shows like this one, you just give money to the people who are destroying our country with corrupt, evil laws. Your children are being sent to jail by laws bought with the money from your purchase. Don't give them your gold. If you must see this stupid film, do it at home and keep your money for better things. Make your own art. Originality is just combining things that no one ever thought to combine before." Some of the word-choices were a bit odd -- all eighteen parts combined had the vocabulary of a reader for a toddler -- but it worked brilliantly.

Some of 26's anarchist pals were deep pros at making T-shirts; they lent us their silkscreening kit and showed us how to make a little grid of skull-crossbones logos with PLAYME written beneath. We lined the loaded thumbs up on the pub floor in a grid that matched the skulls on the screen and sprayed sloppy red and black identifiers on the footballs, straight over the naff old Major League Soccer marks.

Finally, we used one of Aziz's specialist printers to run off thousands of feet of scarlet nylon ribbon printed with the same manifesto that we'd loaded into the thumbs, and signed it THE JAMMIE DODGERS. I thought that Jem might mind -- it was his and Dodger's thing, after all -- but he just grinned and shrugged and said, "I'd have a lot of nerve to complain about you pirating from me, wouldn't I? I positively
insist
, mate."

So we threaded lengths of ribbon through all of the footballs and tied them off. We filled urethane shopping bags with them, and admired our handiwork.

"Now," said Chester, "how do you plan on getting them to people before they buy their tickets? Hand them out at some tube station or something?" If there was one thing that Jem's begging signs had taught us all, it was how to efficiently distribute small free items to commuters going into and coming out of the underground.

I shook my head and swilled some of the mulled wine that we'd made to warm up the night, spat a clove back into my cup. "Naw. Too inefficient. We want to get these to people who are actually planning on seeing the film, right before they stump up their money. Maximum impact." That was the whole idea: maximum impact. A film makes most of its gross on the all-important opening weekend. Attack the box-office take from that weekend and you attacked the studio at its weakest, most vulnerable point.

"I'm going to give them out in Leicester Square," I said. "On opening night."

They all gaped at me. 26 looked worried, then delighted, then worried again.

Jem put a thumb up. "All right," he said. "Why not? Go big or go home, right?"

Like any red-blooded English lad, I have seen approximately one million commando raids conducted with stopwatch precision, thanks to the all-popular military/terrorism thriller genre. I knew how to assemble the pieces: we needed cover, we needed countermeasures, we needed escape routes.