All Write, Already!

Bob's a good guy. He eats what's put in front of him. He doesn't snore when he sleeps. He cleans up after himself, including lowering the toilet seat. He's very gracious and kind to animals and women. He doesn't have a weakness for grog. Last winter, when he was on the schooner coming home from the West Indies, he passed a perfectly good target without firing a single cannonball.

Still, as a pirate, he has his weaknesses. For instance, questionable pr0n and cracked software. He's also fond of that popular booty, MP3's. He's got every BitTorrent and KaZaa variant installed on his homebuilt CPU, and half a dozen hard drives busily gorging themselves on smut and illegal music. His PC's are fastidiously maintained and have never been seriously compromised by either spyware or viruses, and he's thoroughly firewalled and protected by a NAT-enabled router.

As a pirate, Bob's a magnet for lawsuits and the Justice Department. These days that's a lot worse than a frigate bearing the English Crown. Which is ironic, because the booty's free for the taking, and one could argue Bob's not hurting anyone with his pursuits, and that criminals from as little as ten years ago would laugh at him if he were ever jailed for his piracy.

Will Bob walk the plank? Will he be remanded to federal prison, or have to settle half a dozen poorly-conceived lawsuits from a music industry scrambling against the dissolution of its empire? Will the Patriot Act compel his favorite bookstores to quietly comply with requests for his most recent book choices? Stay tuned.