I got this book as part of the Humble eBook Bundle. I paid $25 for 13 books. (If you don’t know about the HumbleBundle, click here to learn more, its awesome!!) Over all I say its a 3/5 star book.
This book was released 10/2/2012 and you can also get it from Amazon.com. Here is a synopsis:
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 he 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 why 3/5 stars? I think the content is appropriate to what is happening in the world now, but I felt the author tried a bit to hard to make it “geeky”. There was a lot of name dropping of actual programs and parts that I felt interrupted the flow of the story. It’s not because I didn’t understand the terms, but it was more a WTF moment on why you would even mention it unless you were trying to prove how computer-savvy you were to your audience. I also did not like the attitude of the main character. To me he felt very one dimensional and I didn’t really care how his story turned out. I didn’t feel he was responsible for any of the successes in the story – it was either luck/chance or the supporting characters turning the events to wins. The last point I will make is that since this story was set in England it was a bit weird for me to follow – mostly the slang terms. I’m sure the author was authentic here but not being familiar with some of the terms had me spending lots of time thinking about them. So much so that I often had to go back and re-read pages to grasp the meaning
Overall I do recommend it. The copyright/piracy/patent laws in the US are bad and they are getting worse as old-media corporations try to put in place laws like SOPA, ACTA, PIPA, etc. These corporations and lobby groups use many of the same arguments that were used in the books to pass the restrictive laws. I’m not sure if this book will spur anyone to action. I think it does a great job of opening your eyes to how people see it – that if it doesn’t affect them directly they don’t care – and why we must continue to spread the word against laws that restrict our freedom online. Give them an inch and they will take a mile
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