Ficbot meets the Reader cop

By Joanna

I was sitting in one of the waiting areas at Toronto’s Union Station, waiting for the train to Montreal, when he approached me.

“Hello there,” he said with a pleasant nod. He sat down beside me, and I looked up from my Reader, noticing his eyes—blue, piercing—and his hair—black ringlets wafting adorably across well-chiseled cheeks and a sleek lantern jaw. He was wearing an outfit that looked almost like a uniform, but I couldn’t place from where it might be.

I snapped shut the cover of my Reader and smiled back at him. “Hello,” I said.

“Say, I can’t help noticing,” he continued in that same even, chipper tone. “That you happen to be reading an electronic reader.”

“Yes,” I said. I was always eager to meet a fellow convert to the glories of E. “It’s quite a handy little thing. Wanna see?”

“Oh, I’ve seen it,” he said with an airy wave of his hand. “Lots of times. It’s one of our products, actually.”

It was then I noticed the grim-faced, professor-looking woman beside him, glaring at me with a suspicious, almost disapproving glower. She was carrying a laptop computer bag emblazoned with the same logo as that on my Reader. I felt my hackles go up; I couldn’t say why.

“That’s actually why I came over,” he said. “We have a new security program we want you to try.”

“Security? Security for whom?”

“Well, for everyone,” he said. “You know how security is.”

“No,” I said. I clutched the Reader protectively to my chest and gave his little get-up—the uniform, the laptop bag—a suspicious once-over. “Enlighten me.”

“Well, they are concerned, see.”

“They?”

“The industry. They are concerned that people might be misunderstanding the whole Reader thing, and they want to make sure that everyone is on the same page about this.”

“And?”

“And so they’ve sent us out,” he said. “To major bus terminals all around the world. To do a little check-up.”

“What sort of check-up?”

“Well, all we need to do is plug in your Reader to this little laptop here,” he said. He motioned to his cohort, who swiftly unsleeved it from the case and set it on a little table. “Then we just log you into Reader Store Inc. and do a little cross-reference. If the file list matches, you’re good to go.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then that is a possible copyright violation,” he said. “And that will have to be addressed somehow.”

He did not specify what the ‘somehow’ might involve, and I didn’t ask him. There was too much else which was wrong with this scenario.

“Nope,” I said.

He frowned. “Nope?”

“Nope. It’s a ridiculous idea, and I will not be participating.”

“But you have to,” he said.

“No I don’t. I am getting on a train to Montreal in about nine minutes. I don’t have to do anything.”

“Look, I’m not sure you’re understanding what we’re doing here. It’s just a check. If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t need to worry about it. The file lists will match, and you can be on your way.”

“No, you’re not understanding. What if I have content on my Reader that isn’t from your store?”

He frowned. “I don’t understand how that might be.”

“Well, public domain content, for example. You can find that for free at six million points throughout the internet, and it’s perfectly legal to download it and convert it to any format you choose.”

He relaxed. “Oh, that. We have a filter set up for that already,” he said. “It won’t flag anything with a copyright date prior to 1923.”

“But you’re in Canada, dude. We’re a life-plus-50 country. We don’t follow that rule.”

He looked at the stern-faced professor woman, and she gave a clipped nod.

“No problem,” he said. “We can adjust the filter for that.”

“And what about Creative Commons files?” I asked.

“Creative what now?”

“Creative Commons files. There are files which the author, for reasons of benevolence, philosophy or self-promotion, has chosen to release for free under a Creative Commons license.”

The stern-faced woman’s brow furrowed thoughtfully, and she shook her head.

“Okay, we didn’t think of that one,” he said. “But you can point those out to us manually, and…”

“And what about cheapo indie press pubs with perhaps not the most meticulous metadata? How are you going to filter for those?” I persisted.

“Oh. Um, we can access…can we access other people’s websites?” he asked his companion.

She shook her head, looking ever more unhappy, and he sighed. “Yeah. The whispernet only works on our corporate server account,” he confessed almost sheepishly. “But kudos to you for being sneaky enough to stump us. Um, I can just write down the cheapo indie ones on a piece of scrap paper and check those when I get back to the office.”

He withdrew a pen from his bag, fumbled in his pockets for a second and found a crumpled subway transfer. He carefully uncrumpled it and laid it, and the pen, on the table beside the laptop computer. Then he beamed me another dazzling smile and waited expectantly.

“Personal content?” I said.

“Right! You know, it was me who pressed for that feature to even be included. Some people thought you shouldn’t be able to do that.”

“Well, congratulations on winning that one,” I said. “I’ve taken full advantage.”

“Well, okay, we’ll just open up a second window and cross-check your upload/download history…”

“That only keeps a record of the last ten transactions.”

“Oh. Well, I can get another subway transfer, if you just wait here, and…”

“Dude, train. Montreal.”

He deflated. “Right.”

“Also,” I continued. “I have a sister who lives in California.”

“And?”

“And sometimes I buy things from the American store when I visit her. They have a better selection.”

“Oh! That is not allowed. That’s a violation, right there.”

“No it’s not. She keeps a spare computer for me in the garage so we can network them for World of Warcraft. I have my own account, my own user name and password and everything. No way she’s sharing it. It’s just me and my credit card, buying a book for the ol’ Reader…”

He fidgeted, looked at his companion, gave a nervous cough. “Well, have you bought anything from our store? Anything at all?”

“I have, but not for this device. A few short stories. I use this reader mainly for longer books, so I put those on my cell phone so I have something quick to read on the subway.”

“We don’t sell things for cell phones.”

“Well, yeah. But there’s this little script you can run in Python that extracts the HTML and converts it to a text file…”

“That’s…you can’t do that! That’s a violation of the DMCA!”

“Again, I say, Canada…and by the way, we’re allowed to space-shift here. We’re allowed to do that in your country too, if I am recalling correctly. Didn’t the supreme court decision in RIAA vs. Diamond Multimedia establish a precedent for that in common law?”

The tight-faced companion was pursing her lips so hard they were nearly purple by now. I saw my train pulling in, tucked my Reader into my bag and gave him one final piece of advice before I departed. “Look, buddy, if I were you? I would get with the times here and get in on this while the getting in can be gotten. You miss the boat on this and handle it badly, you’re just going to piss people off. Remember the rootkits?”

“Oh god,” he groaned. “I dated a girl from that project…”

“Then you get it. Look, just let your loyal customers get on with things, will you? Stop worrying so much. Just sell good stuff and make it easy, and everything will be fine, you know?”

I left him. And you know, he could be out there making stuff and selling it and having a grand old time, but I think he isn’t. I think he is still sitting there to this day, on his lonely little chair in the waiting area at Union Station in Toronto. He’s still sitting there. Waiting for a violation.

THE END