Dr. Dobb's Journal August 2002
It was late and everyone had left Foo Bar except a man who sat in the shadow the booth the man was sitting in cast against the dim electric light the booth the man was sitting in was under. The man liked to sit in the booth in the shadow under the dim light late in the night and send e-mail to science fiction writer Larry Niven on the man's wireless laptop. I was behind the bar alphabetizing the cordials and running the bar rags through the laser printer. I watched the man sit in the booth and when it was quite late a woman came in with a square jaw and square glasses and a camera crew.
"This is Ashleigh Banfield," the woman said to the camera, "coming to you live from Foo Bar, the top-secret watering hole of the high-tech cognoscenti."
I liked the way she kept herself in frame as she moved. She looked good all dressed in khaki and she looked like Hemingway on safari and she looked around the room.
"Where are the cognoscenti?" she asked me.
"Released on their own cognizance, I guess. Can I get you something?"
She sat on a barstool and kept facing toward the camera.
"I am sitting on the very barstool where futurist Paul Saffo or high-tech journalist John Markoff or Apple CEO Steve Jobs may have sat and shared the secrets of Silicon Valley with the likes of this simple bartender," she said, and I pulled another bar rag out of the printer.
She gave the camera her profile. It was a good profile.
"Intellectual Property," she said, speaking in a headline voice, "A system out of control." She pushed the microphone in my face. "Your thoughts."
"Um, sure. Why not."
"Would you say that cases like Ralph Lauren suing the U.S. Polo Association over ownership of the word 'polo,' or Florida Governor Jeb Bush trademarking his name are evidence of intellectual property law running amok?"
"Yeah, I guess so."
"What about the patent on cutting hair with two hands? Or the European copyright on the smiley face? And why are you running those bar rags through that printer?"
"I'm bar-coding them."
"You're bar-coding the bar rags?"
"These are souvenir bar rags. We sell them to tourists as souvenirs."
"Does anyone ever buy one?"
I looked away. The man in the booth started to unpack his briefcase. He took out a hardbound logbook, Scotch tape, a good cell phone, a fine digital camera, a Dragon speech recorder, a hat, reading glasses, good sunglasses, NasalCrom, Sudafed, BandAids, aspirin, superglue, extra pens, a magazine, a book, and a good headset with a cell phone adapter.
"I know there's a computer in here somewhere," he muttered.
"I was just picturing the FBI," I said, "storming into a barber shop saying, 'Where did you get that hair cutting technique?'"
She turned back to the camera.
"The examples are legion. Bailey's Irish Cream has trademarked 'Yum.' New York's Village Voice refuses to let other cities have a 'Voice.' In LA this year, a fight between two organizations over the ownership of the phrase 'Arbor Day' wrecked Arbor Day.
Celebrities protecting their images and their DNA, companies claiming ownership of common words, common procedures being deemed protected business processes. Where will it all end?" She put the microphone in my face again.
"Beats me."
The man in the booth had found his laptop and was typing on his keyboard. He was dressed in khaki and had a square jaw and square glasses. He looked like Hemingway on safari.
"For a bartender, you're not very colorful."
"I'm just part-time."
"Well, are there are any colorful characters in this place?"
"You could talk to Jerry. Jerry Pournelle. He's in the booth over there."
She went to the man in the booth and so did the camera crew.
"Are you Jerry Pournelle?"
The man bowed without standing up. "That's what my royalty checks say."
"Well, where did you get those glasses?"
(Readers wondering how much BYTE columnist and science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle really looks like MSNBC anchor Ashleigh Banfield or Ashleigh Banfield looks like Ernest Hemingway, can view Jerry's visage at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/, Ashleigh's mug's at http://www.msnbc.com/, and a list of pix of Papa at http://www .hemingway.org/. The usual content of Jerry's briefcase was itemized in one of his recent columns at http://www.byte.com/.)
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mike@swaine.com