Things are hopping downtown at the Treasury Building lately – which isn’t to say that anybody there knows what they’re doing. That, I’m afraid, would be too much to expect, even with a new and idealistic Administration facing the greatest challenges of our generation. I could say that working with members of the Civil Service is like dealing with illiterate Hottentots, but then I’d have to apologize to illiterate Hottentots, wouldn’t I? So the need for a good, stiff drink or two after 5:30 rolls around is, I trust, understandable, and the Round Robin Bar at the Willard Hotel is first-rate and only one block away.
So, as it is said, having no shoes, I once felt sorry for myself – until I met a man with no feet. Thus it was, as I walked into the Round Robin, that I spied Arne Arneson, of the Swedish Embassy, in obvious misery and despair, tossing back ice-cold shots of Absolut as if they were water.
“Better slow down, my friend,” I admonished Arne as I took a seat on the stool next to him, “before your face decides it has an urgent appointment with the floor.”
Arne’s hand paused, mid-swig. Holding the half-empty shot glass up to the light, he considered it, and, presumably, my advice, for a long moment. “Nah,” he finally muttered, “not until I’m numb enough.”
“To deal with what?” I inquired, signaling for the bartender’s attention.
“My children and the God-damn Pirate Bay,” Arne moaned disconsolately, gesturing to the bartender and at his shot glass, indicating another refill.
“A Blanton’s Single Barrel Manhattan;” I requested, “up, with a shot of bitters.”
Arne nodded as the bartender poured him another shot of vodka. “Good stuff, that Kentucky bourbon,” he smiled approvingly.
“No doubt about that,” I concurred, eyeing him with concern. “But how did the Pirate Bay get you drinking like a Norwegian gone ice fishing, Arne?”
“Damn trial,” Arne grumbled.
“You mean the one in Sweden,” I asked, “where the operators of the Pirate Bay BitTorrent indexing site are charged with facilitating and aiding international copyright infringement?”
“Yeah,” Arne gravely affirmed, “that’s the one.”
“But Arne,” I reminded him, “you’re the Scandinavian Cultural Attache! What do you care about information technology?”
“Nothing,” Arne spat ruefully. “When I first arrived here, ten years ago, to take that position, you know what I found in my office closet?”
“What?” I responded as my Manhattan arrived.
“A manual typewriter, a crank-operated adding machine, a wire dictation recorder and a rotary-dial telephone, that’s what,” Arne declared as he knocked back yet another shot. “I found out later that the very first Scandinavian Cultural Attache assigned to the Swedish Embassy here in Washington, back in 1936, used those to do his job. And you know what? I could still do my job with those if I had to! [Expletive] computers! They’re nothing but [expletive] trouble, that’s what they are!”
“For better or worse,” I lamented, “those days are gone forever and computers are here to stay. But since, as you just pointed out, you don’t even really need your office PC, your Web browser, your e-mail account or your Blackberry to do your job, why are you here getting snockered over something as geeky as peer-to-peer technology?”
“Peer-to-peer?” Arne stared at me blankly.
“Oh, yeah,” I continued, “you wouldn’t know what P2P is, of course. Most people don’t, even the ones who think they’re tech-savvy. But it’s actually been around for decades – the paradigm is so old, in fact, that mainframe and minicomputers used to employ it. And it’s got a lot more applications than just file sharing, but most people who think they know about it labor under the illusion that’s what it was invented for. P2P technology could have continued to languish in relative obscurity if it hadn’t been for a company called Nullsoft that America Online bought back during the Dot-Bomb Boom. Back then, of course, nobody cared what Internet and Web companies did – business models were considered irrelevant. So nobody at AOL ever spent the four or five hours it would have taken to find out what the geeks at Nullsoft were up to, and maybe, if they had the common sense God gave a picnic ant, figure out that releasing Gnutella onto an unsuspecting world might not be exactly the best idea since sliced bread.”
“Nutella?” Arne was really puzzled now. “That’s some kind of chocolate hazelnut spread, isn’t it?”
“It’s software, and it’s spelled G-N-U-T-E-L-L-A,” I clarified. “And no sooner had Gnutella been let out of Pandora’s box than another little P2P monster, called BitTorrent, followed in 2001; and BitTorrent is the P2P architecture that Pirate Bay uses. Today, some estimates have it that 35 to 45 percent of all Internet data traffic results from BitTorrents or other P2P file sharing activity.”
“My son,” Arne exclaimed, “says that’s all from people stealing movies and music. He hates the Pirate Bay.”
“Why should he care?” I wondered aloud.
“Because he works for a digital effects company in California. They do a lot of work that ends up in Hollywood movies. He claims he can show me a study that proves the Pirate Bay cost him at least three thousand dollars off his 2007 income.”
“That sounds,” I observed, “like the Hollywood party line, alright. The plaintiffs in the Pirate Bay case include Warner Brothers, MGM, Colombia Pictures, Fox, Sony, Universal and EMI.”
“Yah,” Arne went on, after summoning another shot of Absolut, “but my daughter, she thinks the guys at Pirate Bay are heroes. She says that BitTorrent can be used to transfer free and open software around the Internet more efficiently than anything else, and that the real reason for them trying to crush the Pirate Bay is to keep Microsoft in business another five years. And on top of that, she says all those fellows at the Pirate Bay ever did was offer information about the location of BitTorrent files. So there she was, outside the court house, with all those other protesters, waving flags that said ‘C-T-R-L C’ and ‘C-T-R-L V.’” Arne slammed his shot glass on the bar and looked over to me. “What the hell do those mean, anyway?”
“Pressing the Control key in combination with the letter C and the letter V,” I explained, “causes most computers to copy and paste content, respectively. So, what the protesters are saying is, using BitTorrent to transfer content on the Internet is no different than using those commands to make copies of content on your home computer. Their point is, it would be absurd to sue somebody for making a copy of a copyrighted text using those commands and it’s just as absurd to prosecute the Pirate Bay for providing a tool that amounts to no more, conceptually, than a very powerful copy and paste utility.”
“So that’s it,” Arne sighed. “Until you told me, I thought maybe they were trying to revive the Dada Movement. Too bad for Sweden, then, that we signed the World Intellectual Property Organization Geneva Copyright Treaty of 1996. Because under that, I think maybe the prosecutors have a case against the Pirate Bay. But what the hell do I know? I’m no Swedish prosecutor, that’s for sure.”
“It’s probably not a good time to be one, either,” I opined. “I read this morning that Håkan Roswal, the guy who has that particular job at the moment, amended his case against the Pirate Bay this morning by withdrawing the charge of ‘complicity in the production of copyrighted material.’”
“Which,” Arne grunted, “leaves the Swedish government with what?”
“Something,” I told him dryly, “called ‘the making available of copyrighted works,’ which is, apparently, also illegal.”
Arne contemplated the liquor bottles stacked behind the bar, knitting his brow. “So, if I have a box of old phonograph records from the 1950’s in my basement, and I sell them to my neighbors, I’m ‘making copyrighted works available’ without paying the copyright royalties to the estate of Elvis Presley or whoever it is that owns ‘Blue Suede Shoes?’”
“That would probably be the estate of Carl Perkins,” I offered, “if indeed his music publishing company didn’t get bought by Michael Jackson or somebody like him – Jackson bought most of the Beatles’ catalog, you know. All the copyright royalties on ‘Yesterday’ go straight into his bank account now.”
Arne grimaced. “Damn! I didn’t know that! And to think, I used to like the Beatles.”
“Well,” I remarked, “it’s certainly a fantasy to believe, in most cases, anyway, that the creative people who write songs and screenplays, perform music or work their butts off making motion pictures ever get a significant amount of the revenue from sales of sound recordings and movies. That money goes to executives, company staff, marketers, salesmen, and major stockholders, not the artists. And as if that weren’t sufficiently obscene, those artists usually have to give up – or often get cheated out of – the copyright royalties on their work, too.”
Arne motioned for the bartender to pour him another shot. “I tell you Tom, you ought to hear my son and daughter go at it about the Pirate Bay – hammer and tongs, hammer and tongs, for hours they argue! Or they did, anyway – they haven’t spoken to each other for nearly two years now.”
“Gee, Arne,” I consoled, “it’s always a shame when a parent has to watch their children fight over something, particularly an issue like the Pirate Bay. But,” I gestured to his shot glass, “don’t you think you’re taking the whole thing a bit too seriously?”
“Tom,” he replied in a husky tone, “I don’t care if my son and my daughter want to get in a big fight over the Pirate Bay – to tell the truth, I don’t care if those rascals go to jail or the record and movie companies get laughed out of Sweden. What I’m drinking to forget is what my children did to me.”
“Which was?” I sipped my Manhattan, patiently waiting for an answer.
Tears welled up in the old man’s eyes. “They wanted me to take a side. My son claims his livelihood devising digital special effects for action films and animating the characters in some new Disney 3-D ‘Mickey Mouse Meets Hannah Montana’ project depend on putting the Pirate Bay boys in jail and shutting down file sharing on the Internet forever. My daughter says nothing less than intellectual liberty and freedom of speech all over the world are at stake! So I did what anybody who works at an embassy would do – I tried to be diplomatic and tell each of them something conciliatory. But they wouldn’t buy it. They know me too well, I guess,” he whispered, shaking his head sadly and then taking another shot of vodka. “’Don’t try that with me, Dad,’ they’d say. And so, I gave up and did something stupid. I told my son I agreed with him; and then I told my daughter I agreed with her; and then…” Arne lowered his head slowly into his hands. “I should have known. The first thing each of them wanted to do was call the other and gloat about how Dad said they were right!”
“And now?” I quietly queried.
“Now,” Arne sobbed, “they are both so angry with me, neither of them will let me see my grandchildren!”
“That’s not a very mature reaction,” I volunteered. “And you shouldn’t blame yourself when your adult son and daughter behave like that, either…”
“Their mother,” Arne angrily interjected, “spoiled them rotten! That’s the reason they behave like this. But did they call her long distance from Burbank and Stockholm to talk and talk for hours about this crazy business? Did they drag her into this WIPO versus the Pirate Bay nonsense and demand she side with one or the other? No, they did not! And now, she can still visit the grandchildren, but I can’t! You know what I wish? I’ll tell you – I wish that the scummy record producers, rotten movie moguls, slimy corporate executives, greasy P2P geeks, pimply, thieving file sharing punks and Pirate Bay snot-noses all get struck down by lightning, die like rabid dogs and fry in Hell forever, that’s what!”
“You know, Arne,” I mused as I gave him a sympathetic pat on his heaving shoulder, “though it may not be for precisely the same reasons, I’m sure there are plenty of other folks who feel the exactly the same way about the situation.”