Confessions of an Internet Avenger
But from late 1997 until early 2001 I made a living playing Erin Brockovich's copyright-obsessed second cousin in San Francisco federal courts. This followed most of a year working what must have been 80 hours a week as a National Writers Union volunteer, trying to get the union to hire me; another nine months working what must have been 60 hours a week as a union half-time employee, trying to get hired full-time; an only marginally saner two-plus years at 40 hours a week as the NWU's assistant director for public relations and membership development, and director of licensing. Striking out on my own, I saw my income continue to rise improbably in inverse relation to the amount of dirt under my fingernails, until finally just about the only discrete task remaining was the surreal and recursive exercise of preparing a monthly invoice.
"Well, you always said you wanted to write fiction," a friend told me. He was referring to the invoices.
Yes, my fellow lazy workaholics, there is a Zen to success. This is about the little unlicensed lawyer fighting to get out from inside all of us. (Oh. You mean it's just me?) It's also about how a life was empowered, maybe even saved, by the personal computer and the Internet – not because of any of the futuristic babble you've read about, mind you, but simply because those tools provided a platform for the quirky form of political activism in which I was specializing and for which I discovered a marketable gift.
The big deal in the new economy is "branding," the signature stamp of one's product or service. It took me a while to figure out what to call myself at a cocktail party in three words or less. Then it hit me: I was a "copyright litigation consultant." And, man, it was a wild ride. My first case settled for more than seven million bucks. The second was poised to make even more money for certain folks (including an additional relative chump change for your humble narrator), as well as to slam-dunk an important area of new law, before the United States Supreme Court stepped in with its other outrageous writ of certiorari of November 2000. The Supremes ultimately ruled in favor of authors' electronic rights, and that's very good news. But the union, and not an independent consultant, will properly be playing point on future litigation. I'm back full-time in the lucrative field of freelance writing.
Over the course of seven years I can honestly say that I was never once shaken in my belief that I was on the side of the angels in the legal and policy dispute over how creators should share in the spoils of new technologies. Having efficiently rationalized an array of envelope-pushing tactics, I proceeded to deploy them, one by one. I had no master plan, only an unfathomable faith that every time the Lord closed one door He opened another. But I wasn't the only worthy resourcefully playing the cards fate dealt him. Nor, after the standard-issue jokes, should we forget that behind virtual lawyers must be real ones, good ones, without whom a lot of sensible ideas, whether public-spirited or self-aggrandizing, never achieve liftoff.
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irvmuch@yahoo.com
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