The judge sat back in his deep leather chair and took a deep breath. He was confused. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to understand what the hell this was all about. He wasn’t a technical person. He and his TIVO weren’t on talking terms. He didn’t know how to program his alarm clock. In fact, he didn’t even know how to pay his bills on the internet — his wife took care of all that stuff. ‘I couldn’t even tell a Goggle from a freakin’ torrent,’ he thought to himself, laughing at what he realised was probably a ridiculous comparison, surely complete and utter nonsense. He shook his head silently. Let’s go over this thing once more.

‘So,’ he thought,  ‘the industry claims that this lady has cost them millions of dollars by giving other people access to her music by uploading files to the internet.’ He didn’t really get a grip on the nature of this “uploading” business, and he was too embarrassed to ask anyone about it, but in his mind he assumed it meant that the defendant had created a “hyperbolelink” on her computer so that other people could gain access to her machine and copy music to their machines. ‘Kinda like givin’ away the keys to your house, inviting anyone to come and go as they please,’ he reckoned. ‘Dumb, but hardly illegal. For fuck’s sake — I don’t think IKEA would ever sue you for giving thugs access to your living room furniture. Not that IKEA chairs reproduce themselves by human touch… Nah don’t matter, you can leave your stuff wherever you want to, even if it’s links on the interwebs. Nothin’ wrong with that. She bought the links… no…. the files, and she can do whatever she wants with ‘em.’ Or could she?

(A text based on a writing exercise generated by WriteThis - 20.06.2009 01:55:21)