Cancel Cable: practical guide to file-sharing is also a calm manifesto

Cory Doctorow 6:42 am Wed Mar 9, 2011

Statistician and tech-book author Chris Fehily's Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff is a provocative, often funny, and informative book that describes in detail how to use infringing download services to get stuff for free. Fehily's book is not only interesting in that it brings clear technical writing to the subject of getting up an running with BitTorrent and various trackers and search-engines, but also for the insightful notes on how the arms race between copyright enforcers and pirates has created many new tools for evaluating the trustworthiness of the files you find online. Fehily touches on the ethics of downloading, the reasons that people participate in it, and how he decides what he wants to pirate and what he wants to buy. Cancel Cable is a remarkably calm look at the technical, social, economic and cultural issues arising from file-sharing, and it's also a damned practical guide to navigating the strange world of file-sharing technology.

Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff

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