McFreedom

Gene jogged my memory a bit more on the SDMI kickoff meeting. It was, I think, just after Diamond had beaten off the RIAA's ridiculous Rio case. We'd filed an amicus brief in that case, so neither the Diamond group nor the Goodnoise group was in much favor with the RIAA. I think we were both there with a goal of keeping our friends close and our enemies closer.

The meeting was down in LA, at an airport hotel, and Gene and I flew down that morning. I had a Hitachi laptop I was planning on getting some work done with, and a tape recorder to record the meeting in case some record company type said something anti-trusty (if they did, I didn't notice, because I ended up having trouble keeping my eyes open). The representatives from Diamond sat behind us, and they were really the pariahs of the meeting. One of the Diamond guys kept looking at us, putting one hand over one of his eyes (like an eyepatch), and saying, "Arrrr!"

Unfortunately, the screen on my laptop went out on that trip, so I wasn't able to get work done there, as I'd hoped. That was how I ended up reading the Wall Street Journal for a lot of the meeting. It was one of those weird experiences where you spend time mostly with people who agree with you - "encryption isn't what the consumer wants and will significantly harm a nascent market while not significantly stopping piracy" - and suddenly find yourself surrounded by a bunch of people just as self-assured that the opposite is true, that "encryption is what the consumer will be happy to take and is necessary to grow this nascent market and stop piracy." It would be like walking into a Flat-Earth Society meeting and suddenly finding yourself surrounded by people who believe it's completely obvious that, well, the Earth is flat.

Gene ended up doing several months' worth of expense reports, there, and then left all the receipts on the table when we left. Towards the end there, we ran into a few business associates, and Michael Robertson. That was before he called us a "stock scam" in the press and we simply had a kind of friendly competition with him instead of the open hostility that came later. Ironically, we never did end up competing with each other.

When we got to the airport, the security guard wanted me to turn on my laptop. "I can't," I explained. "Make something come up on the screen," he insisted. "It's broken!" I was afraid I was going to have to just throw it out or something - and lose my data - but he finally let me open it up, lay it flat on the belt, and run it through the X-Ray machine.