Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow

From the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother, Cory Doctorow, comes Pirate Cinema, a new tale of a brilliant hacker runaway who finds himself standing up to tyranny.

Trent McCauley is sixteen, brilliant, and obsessed with one thing: making movies on his computer by reassembling footage from popular films he downloads from the net. In the dystopian near-future Britain where Trent is growing up, this is more illegal than ever; the punishment for being caught three times is that your entire household’s access to the internet is cut off for a year, with no appeal.

Trent's too clever for that too happen. Except it does, and it nearly destroys his family. Shamed and shattered, Trent runs away to London, where he slowly learns the ways of staying alive on the streets. This brings him in touch with a demimonde of artists and activists who are trying to fight a new bill that will criminalize even more harmless internet creativity, making felons of millions of British citizens at a stroke.

Things look bad. Parliament is in power of a few wealthy media conglomerates. But the powers-that-be haven’t entirely reckoned with the power of a gripping movie to change people’s minds….

So I loved Eastern Standard Tribe (aside from the audio bit) and have been wanting to read more of Cory Doctorow's books. So when I got my Kindle, this was one of the first books I bought (yes, really). Okay, no disrespect to the author, but it has taken me ages to read this. But I still really enjoyed the story and it was quite interesting to think about since most of what we watch is downloaded ...

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