by Eric Flint
IP: intellectual property. The traffic in ideas, the certified ownership of thought.
"Welcome to Cheese Information Center," their fleshtop chirped, just like it would for any ordinary subscriber logging on. "Please enter loyalty information and stand by for discount offers."
"Another day in the brambles." Muffy sighed, pretending resignation. But she was decked out in her finest typing thimbles, with an air mouse dangling from her earlobe like a drop of liquid gold, and a smile that simply wouldn't wipe off.
"I'll stay one click behind you," Pete offered gallantly.
"Hyah, so you can watch my cookies update," she snarked back.
"Muffin," he called her.
"Poot," she replied.
Her full trade name was Muffietta Litting Von Mausland. Pete's was Pyotr Rao CompService, but their licensing agreement expressly permitted looser forms of address, including parodies and pet names, so off they went, punning and ribbing and giggling.
This assignment was makework imposed by Pete's parents to keep him out of trouble, and he and Muffy were under no illusions about it. But the networks were unusually responsive today, the news sites alive with cheerful prattle, and the two of them would take almost any excuse to work together, especially at a chore no sane person would supervise.
And anyway, in another, deeper sense this was a critical task; how else could the status of dozens of subscriber demographics be assessed in real time? How else could the license limit enforcements be validated? While they enjoyed their surf together, Pete and Muffy skimmed user complaints, inspected keyword filters and defensive copyrights along the major portal sites, and otherwise saw that the CIC portfolio remained secure.
Portfolio: an itemized list of investments, securities, and intellectual properties, especially trademarks. Literally, a container for documents, from the Latin portare folium, to carry leaves or sheets. In practice, a service organization for delivering licensed content and protecting the interests of its users.
"Ho!" Pete would text to the logged-in subscribers. "How you doin', peeps?"
"We're peachy, you little trademark stinge," they'd text back merrily. Or anyway if they weren't merry, if they had actual problems to report, he piped them to his message queue for off-line analysis, because why spoil a perfect morning?
Though both were accomplished surfers, Pete and Muffy kept to the portals and pipes for the sake of browser stability. The folio's raw databases, while not actually encrypted, were thick with proprietary acronyms and self-referenced data fields, too twisted for automated probing. "Clutter," some of the rival marklords called it. "A navigation hazard and regulatory quagmire. Who owns what in this mess?"
Which missed the point entirely; the cryptic formats of the database obscured the portfolio's richest intellectual property from would-be infringers. They were a crude but important part of the IP defenses: you want to look in here? Surrender your credit report and open a subscriber account like everyone else. And unless you needed blindingly fast access times, bulk storage was still one of the cheapest commodities in the world.
"Ouch," said Muffy more than once, as the hyperlinks sent her to null pages, or flipped back on themselves, or popped some weird bit of data correlation across her screen. "The good news is, Good News downloads are up five percent! The bad news is, I'm lost." Even at the edges, the database could be tricky.
"You're doing fine," Pete assured her. "You wouldn't guess it, but the main portal is never more than three clicks away."
"And never less than two," she moaned in tones of ghostly doom, waving her arms like noodles. Meaning you could never get home, right. Muffy's humor was like that: funny if you thought about it.
Pete, whose humor was more direct, said, "Put a sock in it."
He liked these thickets, liked their sense of fractal vastness, the way they dripped and seethed with hidden order. IP defenses aside, this wonky database was a boon for the folio's subscribers, who could extract considerable value from manual searches when no other sort of billing credit was available. Data mining, yes. Manually, yes. Even subscribers without a dime to their names could stay privved if they really wanted to, and could find synergies and correlations no machine would ever dream of looking for. Just yesterday, a subscriber had uncovered hints of an exploitable, twenty-two-day cycle in cheese consumption patterns, and today the chat boards were humming about it.
In a market analysis page, Pete and Muffy came upon a lone subscriber repeatedly downloading the same header, scraping select bits of data and discarding the rest. "You're breaking me, dude." Pete texted affably. "You're going to find something, and I'll have to comp your bill."
"I could use it," came the reply, gruff with emoticons.
"Good!" said Pete. "That's what commerce is all about!"
Of course, this kind of subscriber empowerment made Cheese Information Center attractive to the poor and downtrodden and thus lent (some said) a gloomy, shabby air to it. But the sort of people who said that were the sort who overcharged their own subscribers and eventually drove them off. That was just bad business. In Pete's opinion you couldn't make scratch without scrounging, and the cash-starved working classes made loyal subscribers if you just treated them with probity and respect. So where was the problem?
Still, the brambles did make for hard surfing. "I'm lost," Muffy said again, and this time even Pete needed a minute to work out where she'd clicked to. So went the morning, and after two exhausting hours Pete and Muffy parked themselves in a high-level summary page with a view of all the major stats and knocked off for an early lunch. Thai pizza, delivered right to their cube. Privileges of rank, oh yes.
"It's certainly a fine group of assets," Muffy said, scanning through the portfolio highlights. She'd only been here eight months, and was still saying things like that. In fact, she was saying them more and more often—"dropping hints," Pete's 'rents had noted dourly on more than one occasion. She was sniffing around for a marriage proposal, they insisted, and though Pete was willfully dense about things like that, even he had to agree.
"We've talked about this," he said to Muffy now, in mildly warning tones.
"What?" she asked innocently. "Can't I sit up here and admire the stats?"
No, Pete wanted to say. Not like that you can't. Not without breaking my heart. "The 'rents say our portfolios are incompatible."
"Incompatible?" she snarked. "Incompatible? My family makes cheese, Poot! Or owns the process, anyway."
"A process. One of thousands."
"With high peer ratings," she countered. She was blushing now, and on the brink of real anger. This was a sore subject, clearly. But it was sore for Pete, too, and she was the one who'd brought it up.
"Let's not fight," he said, holding up his hands. "Okay? Let's not. I'll feed you a slice."
For a moment she just glared. Then she sort of shrugged it off and settled back with her elbows on the desknic blanket, looking up at him with those big, blue, trademarked eyes of hers. She was smiling again—thinly, tentatively—and he was dangling a wedge of the pizza just out of her reach, making her snap for it. Then, seeing the metaphor in this and thinking better of it, he actually let her take a bite. He wanted to be her knight and shining lawyer, not some stingy marklord slapping late fees on her bill.
"I could up your privileges," he suggested. "Comp your bill, make you my personal assistant or something."
"Could you really," she said, losing her smile again. The subject no longer amused her. "Do you think this is about money, Pete? Or privs?"
Well, damn. He knew it wasn't, but what did she expect him to say? Her folio was respectable enough—the patents had mostly expired, but she did have a stake in some trademarks, copyrights, secret formulae, and whatnot. Her name and face weren't exactly in the public domain, right? Her family had license agreements through damn near every sector of the economy!
What she didn't have, though, was a subscriber base. As far as Pete knew, she didn't have one single subscriber anywhere in
the world. To put it simply, she was a kind of gal, where he was a full-fledged . Even her name was owned by, and licensed from, the Mausland portfolio, whose holders were her distant cousins. Really, if not for the billing credit she earned at Cheese Information Center—credit that could be swapped at a loss for goods and services from other portfolios—he wasn't sure she'd have any income at all. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but his 'rents did have a point: if he was merging at a loss and she at a gain, then their marriage would be so swathed in prenups that they might as well live in separate houses, on opposite sides of the planet.
In purely legal-economic terms, anyway. Lately Pete had begun to suspect there was more to life than legonomics; you couldn't trademark a feeling, after all, though many had tried. And yet, these fleeting, ephemeral feelings were some of the most important things in Pete's life. That was a heresy he shared with no one—not even Muffy—but it drew his mind the way an aching tooth attracts the tongue. If intangible things could be desired, then couldn't they, in principle, be packaged and bartered as a sort of IP? Quid pro quo; could the best things in life be free? Really?
"I love you," he said simply. "I do. I just don't know . . . how to act on it without hurting you. Or myself."
And there might just be something to his theory after all, because that pulled the plug on Muffy's anger. A simple voice message, that primal ancient medium, seemed to give her what she needed. But it deflated her, too, leaving nothing else to talk about. With a melancholy air settling into the cube, the two of them took up their pizza in silence.
Damn.
"My grandfather built this folio himself," Pete offered by way of topic change. He gestured at the screen, where the properties were summarized by category and the categories were color-coded by market value, net cash flow, number of active subscriptions, et cetera. "The data weren't laid out so neatly for the early marklords, before the full power of IP had really sunk in. They were more worried about schedules and budgets than they were about ledger sheets and subscriber rolls. They were like gentleman farmers, breeding and counting their sheep but forgetting to, you know, shear them."
Muffy's laugh was uncertain, quivering between the professional and the intimate. Pete felt a rush of sympathy for her, for the awkward position he'd just put her in. I love you. Hell, even he didn't know what he meant by that.
"That's not a criticism," he pressed on, trying to bury the issue in words. "Without the managed flow of human capital, their world was kind of fogged in. Who controlled information? Back then it was all about authority: Bachelor of Arts, Master of Sciences, MBA, and Juris Doctor. There was no cheap way to measure skills and no polite way to measure wealth, so the schools and universities did the sorting for you. The transcript agencies told you what social class people came from, where they ranked in it, how much they knew. That was supposed to tell you how far they'd go in life, how much value you could extract, and how much you should pay them in return."
"Reverse subscribers," Muffy snarked, "selling labor and blackmailing employers with the threat of idleness." It was a fair analogy, made ironic by the fact the Muffy was, herself, a paid employee of sorts. And hardly idle.
"Right," Pete said, pleased by her wit. "But unless there was a labor shortage, the threat cut both ways. Employers could fire without warning or cause. Oh, Granddad looked good on paper, as they said back then. At my age he had all the right parchments on his wall, all the right bullets on his rsum. But he was powerless. I've read his diary, and he used that word: powerless. He had no assets, no cash flow except what his bosses chose to pay him. In those days, believe it or not, intellectual property lawyers were the hirelings of the merchant class. Like doctors."
In spite of everything, Muffy giggled. It was a cute observation, her tone suggested, but she wasn't buying it.
"No, I'm serious," he told her. "IP ownership and IP defense were completely separate issues back then. Until that changed, the marchival age was just a business plan. Ours may be a minor portfolio in the grand scheme of things, but Granddad was one of the first to see the writing on the wall. His colleagues laughed when he opened his own portal site. About cheese! That wasn't something a respectable attorney was supposed to do. But piracy and litigation were rampant in those days, and the people who dealt with cheese all flocked to him for information, and eventually for formal licensing and protection agreements. And with subscriber money coming in, he started buying up content, hiring writers and designers, copyrighting recipes . . ."
"Becoming a mark holder . . ." Muffy offered. She'd never heard this side of history before, and it clearly intrigued her.
"Well, yeah, but you could only trademark words and pictures back then. Of course, if you knew the system really well, if you trademarked the right words and pictures, you could end up owning a molecule. Patents expire, right? But a trademark is forever. And from there it was just a matter of buying up the regulations so that, for example, making cheese without your molecule would be a violation of the health code. Pretty soon, anyone who wants legal access to cheese is going to have to pay you for the rights. To subscribe to your portfolio."
"Poot, I think I'm passingly familiar with that part of it," she snarked. Oh, right. Because as a paralegal and game theoretician, she administrated it for a living.
Something shifted in Pete's brain. Maybe a bit flipped, or a quantum uncertainty collapsed and untangled. Maybe he just made up his mind. "I'd like to be passingly familiar with you," he said, grabbing for her, burning with sudden desire.
For a moment, she looked ready to deflect him. She was still mad; her emotional shields were up. "Pete," she said warningly. But then a catty expression flickered on, cool and measuring and ever so slightly playful, and before Pete could fully parse the look she was leaning in toward him, too close and too fragrant for abstract study.
And who knows where that might have led? For better or worse, they were interrupted by the jangle of a telephone. She sighed and picked it up.
"Yes? Oh."
She covered the receiver with her hand, and said to Pete, "It's a user complaint."
"Escalated all the way to me?" Pete asked, blinking in surprise.
She was listening to someone on the other end, but she nodded at Pete, too. Yes, escalated all the way to you.
"Uh-huh," she said into the phone, glancing at the screen and tapping her way down to individual subscriber records. "Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, the system appears to have all your information, ma'am. I'll raise the issue with counsel, and you should hear from us sometime in the next few hours. You . . . what? Well, yes, he is available. Shall I put you on speaker? Hold on."
She pressed a button.
"Counselor Pete," said a woman's voice on the phone, sounding frantic. "They jacked my account! Somebody. I didn't . . . These aren't my charges!"
"Slow down," Pete tried. Then, when the woman continued yakking, "We have your data right here, ma'am. You're clearly upset, so I'm going to transfer you to customer service for appropriate counseling. But you—"
"I can't afford this! My charges are always—"
"Ma'am," said Pete, "I haven't studied your case file, but you have my personal guarantee we'll figure this out. This is Cheese Information Center; no one pays for services they haven't received. Have a nice day if you can, and thank you for calling."
He gestured to Muffy, slashing a hand across his throat, and Muffy dutifully took the woman off speaker and punched in the transfer codes. Damn, she would make a good personal assistant. Or more.
"Now that's what I call probity," he said, in a moment of self-congratulation.
Probity: the legal doctrine of moral obligation. From the Latin probitas, meaning honesty or fairness. He wasn't obligated to speak personally with the plaintiffs he represented; most mark heirs wouldn't bother, even fleetingly. "What is this, a billing dispute?"
Muffy nodded. "Strange one. Apparently there are phantom charges on her account."
"I'd gathered."
&nbs
p; But it was strange, because in this day and age it was difficult indeed to steal an identity or to stick another person with your bills. Phantom charges were rare, and phantom charges that couldn't be cleared up by first- or second-tier tech support were rarer still. This woman's credit bureau had somehow cleared the transaction, had somehow believed that she actually owed the money. Which meant it was probably a royalty charge of some kind, generated and billed from within the portfolio itself.
But the charges couldn't be legitimate, either, or tech support wouldn't have escalated the issue, and the browser screen wouldn't be full of blinking red numbers.
"Pirates?" suggested Muffy. "Operating inside the license limits?"
"Bandits in our borders?" growled Pete. "For their own sake, I certainly hope not."
But when they sat down to follow the data trail, it quickly became obvious that that was indeed going on. That or worse. In fact, over the past several hours four different subscribers had been phished and scaled so thoroughly that they couldn't afford the network charges to log on and complain. As far as Muffy could tell they weren't bankrupt yet—that would take time, and the intervention of courts with bigger nuts to crack—but they'd been left out to rot nonetheless. She of course sent a financial response team to, at the very least, waive their late fees and stabilize their cash flow until an executor had a chance to audit their losses and, if possible, reverse them.
