The Project Gutenberg eBook, Printcrime, by Cory Doctorow

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Title: Printcrime

Author: Cory Doctorow

Release Date: April 24, 2006 [eBook #19000]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
Last updated: January 19, 2009

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRINTCRIME***

Copyright (C) 2006 by Cory Doctorow.

Printcrime

(originally published in Nature Magazine, January 2006)

Cory Doctorow

The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight. I remember
the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da's look of
ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm,
fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.

The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them
reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da's
customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade
pharmaceuticals -- performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic
boosters. The kind of things that cost a fortune over the counter; the
kind of things you could print at home, if you didn't mind the risk of
having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies,
hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything
that got in the way.

They destroyed grandma's trunk, the one she'd brought from the old
country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit
over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of
his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of
printer-wire.

Da. What they did to him. When he was done, he looked like he'd been
brawling with an entire rugby side. They brought him out the door and
let the newsies get a good look at him as they tossed him in the car.
All the while a spokesman told the world that my Da's organized-crime
bootlegging operation had been responsible for at least 20 million in
contraband, and that my Da, the desperate villain, had resisted arrest.

I saw it all from my phone, in the remains of the sitting r