Pirate Cinema
In a dystopian, near-future Britain, sixteen-year-old Trent, obsessed with making movies on his computer, joins a group of artists and activists who are trying to fight a new bill that will criminalize even more harmless Internet creativity.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
30mentions
28people
2012–2025years
33% recommend60% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- >Cory Doctorow
Little Brother was, for a long time, my absolute favorite novel. That and Pirate Cinema.
- > Plenty of abandoned taverns in inhabited cities in the modern world.
This is a key plot point of the excellent novel Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow. Highly recommended.
Free ebook download from the author's site, here: https://craphound.com/pc/download/
- Kids making movies by remixing copyrighted content and perhaps shooting some more is the topic of Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow. Pretty good book that explores the social implications of such efforts.
- A lot of what Cory Doctorow writes is accessible to a young adult audience, like Pirate Cinema and the Little Brother series. For younger kids there are probably lots of books at the library with a science fiction theme for those just getting a taste for reading. I think Choose Your Own Adventures were some of the first sci-fi books I got into when I first learned how to read.
- There’s so much awesome SF out there... it depends what you like!
Personally, in very different styles, I found pretty much everything written by Iain M Banks excellent (start with Excession or Player of Games), I enjoy John Scalzi’s humourous sci fi space operas a fair bit too, Peter F Hamilton’s Reality Dysfunction trilogy was pretty decent... I’ve loved most of what I’ve read from Charles Stross but particularly Accelerando, Greg Egan’s Diaspora was awesome, like a modern day Childhood’s End (read that too if you haven’t, though it’s aged badly). Cloud Atlas is sorta science fiction and amazing. I’ve yet to not enjoy any book by Cory Doctorow - start with Pirate Cinema. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi was excellent.
This should be enough to get you started!
- i have read some very good creative commons novels and fanfiction, so for writing at least free has proven to be high quality. likewise for webcomics; i've seen strips that are every bit as entertaining as the professional strips that run in the newspapers.
for other media, such as music, video and animation, one of the problems is that there is a barrier to creating casual content with decent production values. likewise, something like a play or a movie requires a longer-term and more coordinated effort than just someone sitting in their bedroom writing a story. but i believe that if the means of production were more accesssible, people would put in the effort for the sheer joy of creation. (doctorow's "pirate cinema" is a good read in that regard; the protagonist's art form was creating movies stitched together from clips of other movies. a true creative commons would make that a perfectly viable art form.)
note that history has plenty of examples of really good writers and painters dying in poverty. they were moved to keep creating nonetheless; it's a very powerful human drive.
the one bleak aspect to all of this is that the ability to produce art for free is biased towards people who already have another means of support, and one that leaves them both comfortably-well-off and with free time and energy. yet another way in which a basic income would enrich the world.
edit: i also feel that money-as-a-reward has a deeper problem than the fact that it's currently shackled to ads. once you bring in money (and the implicit idea that the better and more popular your work is, the more money you'll make from it), your incentive is to impose access controls on it, because if there's a way to access something either by paying for it or for free, most people will go the free route. that adds an antagonistic note to the relationship between the producer and the consumer, as well as triggering a spiral of overreach with respect to "intellectual property rights".
