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 to 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
single stroke.
Things look bad. Parliament is subject to the demands 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....