Pirate Cinema (34 page)

"What?" I said. I couldn't think of what it was -- a great video she'd found, a daring location for the next cinema, top grades in some subject at school?

"I've had a call from Letitia. She says that she's going to introduce a private member's bill to repeal TIP. It's been such a disaster -- there's over two thousand people gone to prison now, and most of them are minors. She reckons that between that and all the civil disobedience in the pirate cinemas, there's never been a better time to get the MPs whipped up about the issue. Everyone says there'll be an election before the summer, and no one wants to be on the ballot after voting for a bill that put kids in jail for listening to music and watching telly."

I cocked my head. "I don't know much about this stuff, but isn't this kind of a, you know, a gesture? Is there any chance they'll pick it up in Parliament? Why would they vote
for
this when they wouldn't vote
against
TIP in the first place?"

She waved her hands airily. "When they were debating TIP, the entertainment lobbyists were saying that we were all overreacting, that it would only be used selectively against organized crime kingpins and the like. Now we can show that we were right all along. I rang Annika on the way over and she thinks it might be a goer, too. She says that the cinema nights have kept all the attention on what real creativity is, and on the injustice of TIP; what's more, they're a perfect place to beat the drum for people to get out and support it."

I allowed myself to feel a small glimmer of hope. This was better than I'd ever dreamed: the Pirate Cinema nights weren't just empty protest or a way of having a great party and showing off, they were going to make a
difference
. We would change the law, we'd beat back those corporate arseholes, take power back for the people.

I set down the mask and gave 26 a huge, wet kiss that went on and on for quite some time. I couldn't stop grinning -- not that evening, and not that night, behind the elaborately painted surgical mask I'd swapped with Rabid Dog for. The films had never been better, the crowd never more fascinating, the night never more magic.

A lot of these commercial interludes are meant to be silly or jokey, but I'm going to be serious for this one. I've been giving away free ebooks since February 4, 2003. When I plunged into it, I wasn't entirely sure it would work. I held my breath for about two days. Then my publisher told me the hardcover was selling briskly, and they were delighted with the book's performance, and I let it all out in a whoosh.

Three years later, I quit my day-job to write full time. Two years after that, I had a daughter. Two years after
that
, my wife quit her job to launch a startup. Now I'm basically the sole supplier of income to my little family in central London. We have modest needs, and we do very well, to be perfectly frank. My books sell well, all over the world, and get licensed for audio, for dramatic adaptation, and film, as well as tons of translations. We've got money in the bank, we're putting away some for our retirement, and we're crossing our fingers for Alice's cool startup.

There's a good chance that you can't afford to buy this book. There's a chance that you -- like so many people today -- have no work, or not enough. You might have a family like mine, but you might be finishing up your month with nothing extra to put away. You might be finishing up the month with not enough, and trying to stretch a few bucks further than a few bucks can possibly be stretched.

Or you might be a student or recent grad struggling with loans -- and don't I know what a scam
that
is! Or you might just be down on your luck.

If that's the case, don't worry about it. This one's on me. Get me when you can. And if you can't, that's OK, too. Hang in there.

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Of course, it couldn't last. Those whom the gods would destroy utterly, they first give a taste to heaven to (it's the epigram from
Wasabi Heat
, the deservedly least-known of Scot's rom-coms).

I really dressed up for Letitia's office this time. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's cos I spent so much time in weird-looking rags that were carefully calculated to half-offend people from the straight world, like Letitia Clarke-Gifford: middle-class, ultra-respectable, law-abiding. If I was going to be spending my life eating garbage, squatting in pubs, begging, and making illegal films, I wanted to be sure that the people I met knew what an ultra-alternative, cutting-edge type I was.

But now that Parliament was apparently on my side, I felt like I should at least turn up looking like I'd made an effort to meet them half-way. Lucky for me, slightly out-of-date formal clothes are common as muck in the charity shops, since fashions change so often. I was able to score a very smart blazer-and-slacks outfit with a canary-yellow banker's shirt made out of cotton with a thread-count so high you could use it to filter out flu viruses. The previous owner had scorched the back with an iron, so I reckoned I'd just keep the blazer on.

When I met 26 at the Maida Vale tube, she looked past me twice before recognizing me. Then she clapped both hands over her mouth, crinkled her eyes, and made a very large show out of not laughing at me.

"Come on, it's not that bad," I said. "She's an MP, after all!"

26's shoulders shook. She took several deep breaths into her palms, then straightened up and put them down at her sides. She gave me a kiss and squeezed my bum.

"Do I look that stupid?" I said.

She shook her head. "That's what's got me horrified! It
suits you
! In another life, you could have been a junior banker!"

"Now you're just being cruel," I said. I felt self-conscious all the way to the MP's surgery.

At first, Letitia didn't even want to talk about the bill. Mostly, she wanted to talk about the films.

"I can't stop watching them. They're like popcorn! I download one, then there's another one I want to see, and another, and another -- before I know,
hours
have gone by. Did you make the one where that Scot Colford is driving a black cab around London, describing all the landmarks with out-of-context lines from his actual films?"

I nodded. "The video was dead easy. I just took a matte of the back of Scot's head and some videos shot out of the windows of the Google Streetview cars, and stuck 'em into a taxi interior I'd cut out. The tricky part was finding dialog that worked with all the neighborhoods. 'Course, I was able to cherry-pick the streets and landmarks I had good dialog for, so it was a bit of a cheat."

"God, I loved that bit about 'made of ale!'"

That had been inspired. The first time I'd ridden out to see 26 on the tube, I'd listen to the announcement as we pulled into Maida Vale, but heard it as "The next station is made of ale." Which got me off on a whole tangent about some lost Victorian art of ale-based construction out of thick brown bricks and so forth. Well, one night, I'd been watching Scot in
Barman's Holiday
, mixing up exotic drinks for thick Americans in a seaside bar in the Honduras, and one of them says, "What's this one made of?" waving a mug in his direction. Scot deadpans back, "That is made of ale." When the two clicked together, comedy was born. From there, it was just a matter of picking out some other Scot lines -- "That shop. That is made of ale. That bike. That is made of ale. That boy. That is made of ale." I was worried the joke would get less funny with repetition, and I think it did, somewhere around the 0:30 mark. But by 0:45, it had gone through stupid and out the other side, which is an entirely funnier kind of funny, and the first time I showed it live at a Pirate Cinema, they'd laughed like drains, howling. Even now, people liked to point at random things and say, "That is made of ale." It made me feel brilliant.

"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 multi-color 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, music, 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 pissing
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 damn 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 re-election. 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 was 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.