{Background: people have been saying — on Techdirt, more recently on Techdirt, and now in a thorough 57-page paper that I haven’t finished reading yet — that copyright enforcement is ‘our generation’s Prohibition’. I’ll have more thoughts once I’ve finished the paper, but for now this is immediately where my mind leapt. Metaphors are powerful, yo.}

Mickey pulled his hat down lower over his face before heading into the alley. It was an unpromising canyon of a shadows with a single rivet-bound door at the end. For a moment his heart stuttered and fell to its knees, trying to convince him this was all a terrible mistake.

Anne tugged on his elbow, her smile like a slash in the dim light, as bloody red as her dress. “Come on,” she said. “It’s only frightening the first time.”

Mickey pulled his heart up to its feet and followed.

Anne’s heels staccattoed the concrete as she strode to the door. At her knock, a window slid open just wide enough to reveal a pair of thoughtful brown eyes. Said the man, “Weather’s bad tonight. Looks like rain.”

“They say it’s going to come down in torrents,” Anne replied.

The window snicked shut, then the whole door creaked open. The thoughtful brown eyes belonged to a pale man with wild, astonishing hair and a self-effacing smile. “Hurry up,” he said.

Anne pulled Mickey inside and the doorman pulled the door closed once more. A long hallway led left, then right, then down, then through a dusty cellar. A tuxedo-clad man took Mickey’s hat and politely opened a second thick door.

Mickey stepped into a swirl of music and color and noise.

He stopped to try and get his bearings. Straight ahead was a dance floor, crammed with bodies gyrating to bootlegs of live concerts, lost tracks, and illicit mash-ups—all of which were available upon request from the cat-eared DJ in the front of the room. In velvet-lined booths to the right people were trading reproductions of famous paintings, fan art, and celebrity photos. One girl proudly displayed a sketch where Disney’s Belle and her Beast had been transformed into Chewbacca and Han Solo: Belle’s blue skirt and white apron had changed into a white shirt, blue vest and pants, and the Beast sported a bandolier across his broad chest. The caption read: “I want adventure in the great wide somewhere.”

On Mickey’s left were a row of glass-walled rooms with flickering screens that displayed the latest smash hit movie, classic decade-long television shows, and forgotten classics that were rarely seen outside art houses and film schools in the nation’s two largest cities. Above was a balcony studded with couches and chairs, each of which held someone curled up for comfort, balancing the slender weight of an e-reader in their hands.

And everywhere people were talking, squealing, laughing, fighting, creating, comparing, emjoying. It was lunacy—and it was infectious.

Anne encompassed the whole room with one regal gesture. “Where should we start?” she asked.

Mickey’s face split in a wide grin. “The music,” he said.

Within an hour, Mickey had procured albums by Tom Waits and Otis Redding, things he’d purchased years ago and had since lost. Someone told him about some band called the Avett Brothers, and gave him a copy of Four Thieves Gone. He found a set of headphones and hit play.

Thanks to the high volume of the music and the excellent quality of the headphones, Mickey only noticed the police had arrived when they yanked out the jack. “You’re under arrest,” said the detective. His white trenchcoat fit his broad shoulders like the wings of an avenging angel.

Mickey blinked in surprise. Blue-clad street cops moved somberly through the room, but everyone else had vanished, even Anne. CDs and mixtapes, videos and Blu-rays lay scattered and crushed on the caramel wood floor. As he watched, one cop lifted an axe and brought it crashing down on a screen showing a gifset from The Avengers.

Meanwhile, Mickey’s detective was examining his list of titles. He pursed his lips and whistled. “The Avett Brothers?” he said. “You son of a bitch.”

“I’m starting to really dig that album,” Mickey protested.

“Then why would you take money away from hard-working young artists?” The cop kicked over a stack of copies of Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison. “It’s one thing to steal a dead man’s tunes,” he said. “But a small band struggling to make good?”

“I didn’t know I would like it until I heard it,” Mickey said weakly. “Aren’t they coming to town next month? I’m sure I’ve seen the poster somewhere. I’d love to hear them play in person.”

“Why not just download a bootleg of that concert, too?” the detective snarled.

“Well,” said Mickey, “because concerts are fun.”

“You won’t be able to afford concert tickets for a long while, buddy,” the detective replied. “The last guy we caught with this many MP3s got a six-figure fine and community service.”

“Six figures!” Mickey cried. “You’ve got to be joking.”

“It’s piracy that’s the real joke,” said the detective. “Like the proverbial bad penny, you criminals keep turning up.” He sighed and waved one hand to his subordinates. As the police hauled Mickey away, he craned his head over his shoulder to see that the DJ had already crept back into his booth and the readers were back in their chairs up above. (Had they ever really left?)

Lounging in one of those overhead chairs was Anne, her long legs stretched out easily before her. She smiled and blew Mickey a kiss.

The riveted door slammed shut.

{The inevitable disclaimer: I believe that copyright is vitally important, but that enforcement of copyright has taken some ludicrous turns in the course of developing a practical law. Piracy’s overlap with fair use, international law, and fan culture is still a murky, ill-defined territory. The metaphor of copyright-enforcement-as-Prohibition is initially intriguing — we’ll see if the historical argument holds up — especially since it implies that popular culture is intoxicating, vital, and impossible to quash. But it also implies that popular culture is vulgar, morally dodgy, and may provide a financial building ground for organized crime. And I’m not just talking about bootleg Sopranos episodes. I’ll have more coherent thoughts about this in future.

Also if anyone wants to draw me a picture of Belle and the Beast as Han and Chewy that would be spectacular.

UPDATE: Ask and you shall receive!}