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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.

Ok, yeah, it’s another “young adult” novel like “Little Brother” but who cares? I just finished Cory Doctorow’s “Pirate Cinema,” which recently won a Promethus Award (along with Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon,” another personal favorite).

“Little Brother” tells the story of Trent McCauley, a British teenager whose obsession with making mash-ups using commercial movies gets his family cut off from the internet for a year. This turns out to be a bigger punishment than Trent anticipated, however, as his sister needs the internet for her school studies and his parents need it for work. The strain Trent has caused on his family is too much for him to bear so he runs away to live in London on his own.

What follows is a tale of being homeless, squatting in abandoned buildings, making new friends, showing movies in the sewers and cemeteries, politics, government, lawsuits, intellectual property, art, and copyright law. It’s a lot of heavy (and topical) subjects, but Doctorow does a good job of making the content accessible (and exciting) to younger (and, ahem, older) readers, all in a sort of Londoner writ and tone I haven’t seen him use in previous novels (the book definitely has its own “voice”).

If you’ve followed the news around SOPA and PIPA recently, or enjoy watching mash-ups on YouTube, you” probably enjoy “Pirate Cinema.”