The antagonists are portrayed as so evil that I'm surprised their lawyer wasn't twirling a Simon Legree mustache between two fingers. The subject matter is treated only with jagged strokes of black and white. (I'm surprised they didn't just nick a few pallets of gold that the Royal Treasury was throwing out for being scratched.) The trash becomes a very obvious deux ex machina that drops absolutely anything the characters need into their hands as easily as the Enterprise's synthesizer.

The characters manifest skills in gourmet cooking and construction rehabilitation that are incredibly rare amongst the populace and quickly demonstrate said skills at genius levels that normally take a lifetime of work to develop. This book, however, is so unsubtle a polemic that anyone, including Doctorow, should find it embarrassing to the 'cause'.Ĭharacters break into long dogmatic monologues at the drop of a hat, dialogue that comes across as artificial as the faux-dialogue in student educational films. I am about 95% aligned with Doctorow's beliefs on copyright. But the powers-that-be haven't entirely reckoned with the power of a gripping movie to change people's minds. Parliament is subject to the demands of a few wealthy media conglomerates. 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.

Shamed and shattered, Trent runs away to London, where he slowly learns the ways of staying alive on the streets. Except it does, and it nearly destroys his family. 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. 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.

Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow