“No, I don’t see anything wrong with that. You do it all the time.”
“Right. But I’m paying for it. I pay the cable bill, and if I set up the HD to record a program I want to watch later, or because I won’t be there when it comes on, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if I take that pay- per-view program, run off a copy, and sell it to somebody else, is that right?”
“Why not? You buy a book, a knife, a frying pan, it’s yours, you can do anything you want with it. You can sell it to somebody. That’s legal.”
“One that I paid for, yes. But let’s say I run off fifty copies of a novel, or a DVD movie, and sell them at a discount, then what I’m doing is depriving the cable or satellite company of potential revenue. Fifty people who might have paid for it won’t. Not to mention I’m getting a profit off of something I had no hand in creating.”
“But what if you give them away? You aren’t making any profit.”
“Same difference. I’m not earning money, but I’m in essence stealing from the people who paid to produce it, because those fifty copies come out of the company’s profit.”
“But what if the people you sell them to wouldn’t have bought it at full price?”
“You’re saying it’s okay to shoplift if you don’t have the cash to buy something?”
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, I’m not saying that. But listen. Here’s an example:
8 this piece of music I got from the web. It’s a
thing. Somebody took the words to a hot rock
I put them to the music of a TV sitcom. It’s really Jut the rock stars didn’t think so, so they sued fou can’t buy the song anywhere. So if I download
II hurt? Nobody makes any money on it, it isn’t commercially.”
nodded. “I can see that. Parody is a valid ar: and protected under our laws. But the rock stars ue that the words are their property so it available without their approval. They own ey can sell the song or let it sit on a shelf until it i dust.”
it’s not right. What if somebody bought a famous art, a Picasso, or the Mona Lisa or something, took it out into the yard and slashed it up, set e? Could they do that?”
[ly, yes. It would be theirs, they could do that > I wouldn’t want to be them on Judgment Day in front of God trying to explain why they’d one of the world’s treasures.” it’s my point, Dad. Something can be legal but not Didn’t Jesus say if you had two shirts and your
didn’t have any, you should give him one?” : exactly, but close enough. The thing is, while we | Jesus’s teachings, not everybody does. Laws have I on moral and ethical principles, but they have all the people. And at the heart of western civi- is the concept of private property. And that in- intellectual property, too. You take a man’s living you steal his songs or books or secret formulas. |Jaws are moral by society’s standards.”
laws that allowed … slavery?” ward stared at him. “You gonna throw that up into e? You’re not any darker than I am, son.”
But slavery was legal for a long time. That ‘make it right.”
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“No, it didn’t. And those laws were changed.”
“And it took them, what, two hundred and fifty years to get around to it? We’ve got laws now that will be changed, too. This is the information age, Dad. Old concepts will have to make way for the new ones. The cat is out of the bag, and it isn’t gonna go back in.”
Howard smiled at the memory of his conversation with his son. He was coming along pretty well, Tyrone was. He wasn’t always right, but he did know how to think, and that was important. He had some good points-
Somebody said, “Penny for your thoughts, General, sir.”
He looked up, saw Julio standing there.
“Maybe a nickel, you grinning like that.”
“Just remembering a conversation with Tyrone.”
“He’s doing better, I take it?”
“Not a whole lot since you saw him yesterday, but overall, yes.”
“Good. You here to work?”
“I am. Let’s go into the office and you can catch me up.”
“Well, I can try. I can’t work miracles, sir. Hard to teach an old dog much of anything.”
“If you learned how to change a diaper, Lieutenant, anything is possible.”
They grinned.
Jay Gridley stared at his computer console. He should be working. He should be climbing all over the web like a million baby spiders, running down every lead, trying to find the bad guys who’d been screwing things up. But instead, here he was mired waist-deep in inertia, unable to get moving.
Thinking about getting married.
It still seemed like the thing to do, to get married. He loved Saji. He wanted to be with her.
Well, fool, you are with her, aren’t you?
Maybe that was part of the problem. Nothing much was really going to change if they had a big wedding, signed
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nts, and made it legal. Oh, they’d get toasters and and they’d go on an RW honeymoon-Saji to spend a week on the beach in Bali-and all ; everything else would be the same, wouldn’t it? vemaking, the time they spent laughing, none pf Id be any better if they were married, would it? : that he could see.
f.course, you could twist that both ways. If it didn’t Smuch difference, then why not get married? They’d > to each other legally, in the eyes of man and God, Fthey had property, or even children, there would be i protections that came from that. On balance, there aybe a bit of a plus on the marriage side. pwhy did he feel as if he had just gone over the first a SuperTall roller coaster at Six Flags, with his eh trying to crawl into his throat?
: was there to be afraid of? Especially since it had Hjtaf idea in the first place? He could remember how I he was that Saji was gonna say no when he asked,
relieved he’d been when she hadn’t. t’s the deal here, Gridley? \ shook his head. He needed to talk to somebody who ||Barried. Maybe Fernandez, he hadn’t been with > that long, and he’d been a bachelor for a lot more j than Jay had. Maybe he could offer some insight. ; hoped so. It was bugging him that he couldn’t con: on the job as much as he needed to, not to men- it bugged him these guys were screwing with tially.
< Bou Chance '. had in mind to ream 'Berto out, figuratively, any- ii Yes, he was a perpetual motion machine in bed and I counted for a lot, and yes, he was as good a hammer 160 NET FORCE for smashing enemies as she could want, but he had to understand that she was the boss. When she found him, he was in the ship's gift shop, buying shaving lotion. "Roberto," she said, a little louder and sharper than she had intended. The shop's clerk, a young man in black-rimmed glasses, glanced up at them from where he was stacking candy on a shelf. 'Berto turned slowly and gave her a lazy and insolent raised eyebrow. "Ah. Hello, Missy." The clerk turned back to his chore. Roberto looked like a big torn cat, sure of himself way past confident. Time to crack the whip a little. "You weren't supposed to. leave the ship. Where did you go?" "You know where I was, Missy. Did not the helicopter pilot you asked remember where he landed?" She felt herself flushing under his gaze. This wouldn't do, not at all. She had to stay in control of the situation. "He remembered. What I want to know is why you left without telling anybody." "I don't tell anybody when I'm going to pee, either. Nobody needs to hold my hand for that, nobody needed to know about my business in Fort Lauderdale. Because it was my personal business." "You have responsibilities-" she began. "And I do them," he said, interrupting her. "You have a problem with how I perform, either on the job or in bed?" The clerk stopped stacking the candy and apparently realized he had urgent business on the far side of the gift shop. He went there in a hurry. She lowered her voice. "No, I didn't say that." "Or maybe I didn't worry about telling you because I thought you might not even notice I was gone, that you might be busy." "What are you talking about?" 161 CYBERNATION Jackson fills in for me when I'm not around, as he can, anyway." fjblinked, caught flatfooted by the statement. Okay, so But she wasn't going to give anything away. "I ow what you are talking about." She had learned |lhe corporate world a long time ago-when in doubt, ling. If somebody had a video of you doing ng, if they had ten nuns and a priest as witnesses atever, it didn't matter-you stuck to your story. I don't think his equipment measures up," he eliberately skipping what she'd meant. "But you the one to know that-you the one doing the