Jim Baen's Universe Volume 1 Number 5

by Eric Flint

  The woman on the phone was within her rights to be frantic; she'd been lucky to escape with her privileges intact.

  While Muffy was thus engaged, Pete set about rounding up a crack legal team to take the billing—and if necessary, the litigation—directly to the pirates. Within the portfolio he found Esquires Heimbecher and Hattenbach, Hall, and Hensley, and from the outside world he pulled in two others so famous that this magazine can't afford to print their names.

  "Cheat my subscribers," Pete muttered to the screen.

  Said Esq. Hattenbach through a chat window, "I found a journal reference that clearly infringes. They'll argue fair use, but any court would rule they're a commercial enterprise operating within our mark definitions."

  Pete grunted his acknowledgment. "Does the subject matter match the subscriber charges?"

  "It does. I've drafted a cease and desist . . ."

  "Send it," Pete told him. "There's no sense being polite."

  And when that letter was rebuffed, Esq. Hall remarked, "Injunctions are ready when you are, sir."

  "File."

  "Injunctions away. The defendants are filing a protest, obviously, and . . . here come the counterinjunctions."

  "Object."

  "I have, sir. Sustained."

  Said Hattenbach, "I've got a lien on their assets."

  "Foreclose," Pete grimly instructed.

  "But sir, if we can read their arguments into the record, we may discover their funding source."

  "Funding source? Funding source! They're bloody pirates, Brad, we're their bloody funding source. I said foreclose! I don't want these bastards drawing another nickel out of my subscribers. Out of anything!" Pete was young. Bright and skilled and gallant, yes, but still impulsive. He hadn't consulted his parents—the portfolio's actual mark holders—about any of this. It simply didn't occur to him.

  "Bankrupt," said Hall, watching a display somewhere in his own browser space. "Bankrupt. Bankrupt. B—whoops! The fourth defendant has sheltered his remaining assets and been found not liable. He may be a bystander."

  Bystander? That brought Pete up short. Had he—a member of the holder class—just filed legal action against an uninvolved third party? Against a victim of the pirates, even, maybe a subscriber from some near-linked portfolio? Someone too poor to afford his own justice? That was a damnably modern thing to do, in all the oldest, foulest meanings of the word, and here in the marchival age the code of probity—encompassing everything from fair use to customer satisfaction to equal protection under the law—would condemn him for it. And right in front of Muffy, too, giving her one more victim to attend to. Damn!

  "Assess his court costs and offer him double," said Pete. "Along with my apology. Tell him his subscription is always welcome at Cheese Information Center."

  "Pete," said Hattenbach, "I've found something in the escrow holdings."

  "Eh? What's that?"

  "A funding source. I'll be damned. It's a license agreement with the Chaos Home portfolio, sir, asserting ownership over cheese recipes as a subclass of spoken-word poetry. This isn't piracy at all; it's the opening salvo of a full-scale infringement."

  "Oh. Crap. Somebody get my mother on the line."

  But Pete was too late; his mother was already looming in the cube's entrance, sucking up all the light and heat and oxygen.

  "Ho, Moms," he tried, sensing her there, turning and smiling weakly.

  Whereupon she favored him with the two words he dreaded most in all the world: "Explain yourself."

  * * *

  "I acted within my authority," Pete said firmly. "The defense of our license limits is realtime, online, for keeps. You want me to slack?"

  "We want to be informed," Pete's father replied dryly, "before the red ink starts spilling. Especially the ink of subscribers, m'boy. Gawd, I can hear the bloggers already: Cheese stinks! Butter beware!"

  "An honest mistake," Pete said, trying to walk the line between apology and wounded innocence. "The infringers were agents of Chaos Home, and his username and activity profile were congruent with theirs. You'd've done the same in my place, I think."

  "He was standing nearby?" said Pete's mother archly. "He looked funny, so you filed on him? Young man, probity demands a subtler pen."

  Pete refrained from snarking at that; his mother was not a subtle woman. They were in the corner office, top floor, with a view of the city sprawling below. From the low visitors' chair, his parents' twin desks seemed to loom over him. But there was a Sourcer here as well, clad in the age-old uniform: blue canvas trousers and a black T-shirt adorned in cryptic text. Sysadmin, they'd've called him in days gone by. The man hadn't insinuated himself into the conversation—yet—but he'd showed up at just the right time, claiming a cable fault or something, and was on his knees in the far corner, muttering, pinging the network over and over through some sort of packet-jack pendant slung around his pudgy neck.

  Mother's words had been for the Sourcer's benefit, to soothe any appearance of improbity in the portfolio's management, because any slide in CIC's reputation scores right now could be disastrous. The 'rents themselves were standing at the windows, pacing, looking troubled. If she could say what she really felt, it would have come out a bit differently.

  Seeing his opening, Pete stoked their quite reasonable fears: "What does Anthony Walking Chaos know about probity? Can he just stroll in here whenever he likes? His daughters are famously haughty. Do we let them poach our IP? Maybe I should marry one, eh?, and turn over all our assets with a single click."

  And he could see that hitting home behind his parents' trademarked eyes. Ouch, yes! Chaos Home had once been a wood pulp company, then an information company, and finally one of the wealthiest 'folios in the marchival world. Mark holder didn't begin to cover it; Anthony Walking was a mark jacker and subscription slammer whose litigation skills were legendary and whose docket was perpetually full. He didn't always win, but he did always press the point. Hard. Crossing paths with him was unlikely to leave any of them richer or happier.

  "Your point's taken," Pete's father conceded. "Consider yourself indemnified for the error. But let's keep our heads, hmm?"

  "Oh, dear," said Pete's mother, recognizing that tone in his voice. That tone, which meant litigation if it meant anything at all.

  Father was brusque. "Spare me the hand-wringing, darling. It's quickest if we take this straight to the top. Injunctions and restraining orders, not against the portfolio but against Anthony Walking himself. Make him sweat for his trouble."

  But now it was Pete's turn to play the cooler head. "That's just the 'sponse he's looking for, Dads. It gives him the pretext for a full-fledged class action on behalf of his poor, beleaguered subscribers."

  "Class action? I'll show him class action. I'll strip every asset and throw him out naked in the public domain!"

  "And his subscribers will rally around him," Pete countered. "They'll have to. If he's smart, he'll offer billing credit; if he's cheap, he'll threaten rate hikes and service cuts, with crippling disconnect fees for anyone who tries to defect. And who defects from Chaos Home, anyway? They control all the major storage formats. Lose your license agreement with them and you might as well be off the network! So either way, the subscribers will be throwing themselves in our path in a million petty lawsuits, and we'll be forced to counter. Then you'll see innocent ink on our hands."

  Both parents glowered, having nothing to say to that and nowhere to direct their anger except at Pete himself. But here the Sourcer rose from his knees, dusted them off with a swipe of his hand, and said, "Baseless lawsuits are a violation of your open-source license. You know that, right?"

  "Obviously," Pete replied, with all the civility he could muster. The last thing they needed was to add the open-source community to their enemies list. But really, the Sourcer's comment was (a) condescending, and (b) a blatant threat. If Cheese Information Center lost its Open-source Public License it really would be off the network, sending out—gawd!—paper billing
notices by bike messenger or something, with all the subscription content burned onto optical disks and passed hand to hand in the ancient modern way. At prohibitive cost, yes, until the slush funds ran dry, and the folio was forced to raise its rates, driving away more and more subscribers in a suicide spiral.

  The Battle of Desktop had settled it long ago: you simply couldn't do business without a nod from the Sourcers. They didn't control the network's fiber or its servers; these were owned by legitimate portfolios and a smattering of regional monopolies. They didn't even assert ownership of the operating systems and transport protocols, claiming these were somehow "free" and "open." They didn't have any sort of mark holder or CEO to hear out grievances, mediate disputes, or provide any semblance of marchival civility. Individually they didn't have to own or buy or be anything to become Sourcers; coding skill, knowledge, and mutual acknowledgment were all it took. "The Headless Sourcemen," they were sometimes called, mostly behind their backs.

  But a license was a license, and the Sourcers were quick to rally around their own and to punish abusers. As a result, they could pretty much shake you down whenever they felt like it. They weren't a greedy bunch, but gawd, if you didn't take a few of their mendicants in for at least the three I's (insulation, income, and interesting work), if you didn't tithe to their foundations and pay lip service to their ideals, life could get very difficult indeed.

  On the other hand, at heart their ideals were not so different from the code of probity itself. They were on the side of the angel investors, and if you played ball with them, they really would save your data. Guaranteed.

  So just for good measure Pete added, "It's nice of you to remind us, Admin, before we do something we can't retract."

  "Hyah," the Sourcer replied with characteristic inhumility.

  But Pete's father was having none of that. "What about Anthony? Is he, what, exempt or something? We can't file a preemptive motion, but he can? 'Sup with that?"

  The Sourcer spread his hands. "Man, I've got a full plate right here. You want me to monitor other intranets on the side? He's probably skirting the limits, endangering his privs, but if he'd actually busted license, I think I'd know about it. I think we all would."

  "I smell corruption," Father insisted.

  Crap.

  Before Pete could stick his nose in further, Mother cut in with, "Let the Sourcers police their own, dear." By which she meant, don't pick a fight you can't win, when someone else is picking a fight with us! "Our response should be firm but measured. We want the press on our side."

  But that was a dumb thing to say, and Pete could see she knew it before the words were even out. Because where did the press reside, if not in Chaos Home? Oh, sure, there were free media all over the place, but if they didn't own the rights to a press release—a judge's ruling, say, or rumors of a portfolio merger—how much could they really say? Reformatting and original commentary could only get you so far; even in a world of probity, the indies lived under constant threat of libel and infringement suits.

  "Truth is always in the public domain," the Sourcer quoted, falling back on stale doctrine.

  Pete's father laughed sourly. "Is that all you have for us, you and your feeble priesthood? Truth has to be expressed, Admin, through ownable words and pictures. That's the hand we cuff it by. This is high court, I tell you: class action, full scale. Assemble my legal team."

  But with all this going on, Pete had hatched an idea of his own—or the chick of an idea—up there in his noggin. He said to the three of them, "We could appeal."

  That brought down immediate silence and attention.

  "We could query the director," he pressed, "to broker an out-of-court. Quietly, on the side. Good for business, I would think."

  They were all just staring at him.

  "You think I'm kidding? I can pick up the phone as soon as we're done here." Hyah, like it was that easy. But it almost sounded plausible. Almost.

  Suddenly the 'rents were both laughing, and it wasn't sour at all. They were indulgent, proud of this silly, idealistic boy they had somehow managed to raise. Where did he learn that, they seemed to be asking themselves.

  Then, his chuckle quieting, Father looked out over the city in a thoughtful brood and said, "Well. Well. We lose nothing by trying, eh? My boy, I'll give you five business days. But if it doesn't work out, I'll expect you to coordinate the litigation yourself."

  * * *

  Not surprisingly, the director wasn't reachable. From the main switchboard it took Muffy five hours of runaround just to be connected with the Directory Rolodex, which primly told her, "You'll have to submit your request in writing, along with a full-presence biometric signature."

  "In person?" Muffy asked, blinking.

  "Of course," the Rolodex answered. "For IP security reasons."

  Which made a kind of sense, Pete thought, because biometric data sent over a compromised network might as well have been sketched in crayon. Still, it was an odd hurdle to throw in a plaintiff's path.

  Through the speakerphone he said, "Can't we just mail you an Authorized Face?"

  "With whom am I speaking?" the Rolodex inquired.

  "Pyotr Rao CompService, Counselor Esquire and Mark Heir of Cheese Information Center."

  "Ah. Well, my apologies, sir, but I think you know the answer to that."

  "Hmm," he said. "Well, I suppose we can hire a two-seater dragonfly or something. Can you fax over a physical address?"

  "'Fraid not," answered the Rolodex.

  "Eh? Why's that?"

  "Trade secret, sir, in the interests of IP security. If you were authorized to know it, you'd have no need to ask."

  "But that's . . . that's . . ." Ridiculous, yeah. He tried, "Is there someone else we should speak with?"

  "Oh, counselor, I really am sorry to have wasted your time." The Rolodex was impeccably sympathetic. "I'll set the screening parameters a little higher, OK? So next time you won't have to speak with me. Have a nice day!"

  The phone clicked and toned, and Muffy hung it up. "You too," she snarked at it. Then, to Pete she said, "Now what?"

  "Now we surf," he answered, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He pulled on his typing thimbles one by one, patiently checking each contact and sensor. "Outside the 'folio subnet, someone in this great wide directory must know the way. We'll ask around until we find that person, then we'll get persuasive."

  He was partly joking, but Muffy didn't laugh or even crack a smile, because by now she knew him as well as anyone ever had. And hyah, he could be very persuasive when it suited him.

  Still, as they glanced from portal to portal, leaving the folio's pages behind and surfing out into the wider network, his first real move was a blunder.

  "Ho!" he said on a public chat. "Anyone here less than six degrees sepped from the director?"

  To which a subscriber replied, "Up your pipe, Chumlord. We're having a conversation, here."

  And so they were: a whole gaggle of them were swapping ancient music files, steganographically embedded in the low-order bits of even ancienter porn snaps.

  "Pirates?" Muffy texted in private, clearly unsettled by the layout of this place, and by the clientele.

  "Nah," Pete answered dismissively. "This material's old. Grayware salvage, or maybe even public domain. They're probably hiding it to avoid a licensing hassle with their frontlist media provider. Gawd, are there really people that poor?"

  "Got something to say, Chumlord?" the subscriber snarked at them. "Text it in public or leave us alone."

  The guy's connection was seriously overcompressed; his packets were laggy and lossy, his images pixelated. Everyone's were. Looking around, Pete realized self-consciously that not a single person here was banding more than a megabit per second. At a hundred thousand times that much, he and Muffy were putting the patrons to shame by their mere presence.

  "Meaning no disrespect," he tried.

  "Actually, we're leaving," Muffy added, popping a public banner acros
s Pete's screen—across the screens of everyone assembled here—directing him toward the back button. Dragging him away, as it were.

  But apparently that was six words too many; the subscriber's emoticon reddened in anger, and in another moment the guy slapped a crude freeware cease and desist over Pete's workspace, obscuring Muffy's banner.