In my never-ending quest to publicly disagree with every opinion I dislike, I today turn my attention to the wonderful website that is Overthinking It, your one-stop shop for deep intellectual scrutiny of shallow popular culture, and this less wonderful article in it, titled Why Cory Doctorow’s “Pirate Cinema” Makes Me Root for Big Content by Matthew Belinkie. Yes, I am going to be critiquing a critique of a book. Now, as a critique of the general literary quality of the book, I can say nothing, because I haven’t read “Pirate Cinema”, although of course I could at any time (seriously, check out the official website. Cory goes out of his way to make his stuff accessible). No, I’m going to be criticizing Matthew Belinkie’s view of reality. I may be misreading him here, but it seems to me that his view of reality is substantially different from mine, especially when it comes to copyright and “piracy” and all that jazz, and I feel that his views on these things negatively affect his reading of the book.
Again, I haven’t read “Pirate Cinema”, so when it comes to talking about the style and feel of the book, I’m going to give Matthew the benefit of the doubt, because I’m pretty sure that he did read it, all the way through. That said, on the criticizing!
Lodo the Bear 