An hour or so into the Old Street meeting, Dean finds herself experiencing an acute sense of déjà vu. It’s not the vague type, trace levels of some half-remembered episode contaminating the admixture of the present, jarring it, for a brief moment, into a blurred double-vision of itself … No, this is sharp, precise and instantly identifiable: what’s inserted itself between this conference suite’s long board table, leather swivel chairs, occupants thereof (on the one hand) and (on the other) her apprehension of these surfaces and personae is a photograph, a picture from a bundle she was served up on the second day of last week’s stint in the LSE library.
The photo, taken some time in the 1950s, showed a managerial scenario: seven executive types – five men, two women – seated at three long tables set up in a U-shape round a hanging screen. On to the screen a film was being projected: it (in turn) showed a male worker, or perhaps experimental subject, sorting objects into a series of compartments, while beside him an imposing clock kept time. In their office, or laboratory, or cinema, the manager/scientist film-viewers seemed to be assessing the man’s skill at this task, and hence (Dean surmised) his aptitude for such-and-such a post. She passed over the image at the time, angling for larger catches – didn’t make a note of it or snap it with her phone; but now … now it seems to hang about the room’s corporate air, both spectral and enlarged, a frame and backdrop for today’s whole gathering.
The set-up: a ‘symposium’. Dorley and Grieves, law firm in which she, as junior associate, serves, is offering, for a consideration of one thousand pounds and change an hour, its services to Peacock, a consultancy. Despite this contractual relation and – to Dean – confusingly, Peacock are not D&G’s client in this interaction; rather, they’re acting as intermediary between the IP-specialists and their actual client, whom both parties, in all correspondence, documents and (now) verbal dialogue alike have followed the convention of referring to as Client A. Blind council: when a party’s feeling shy, if you perform due diligence, check they’re not gangsters, terrorists, what have you, it’s all kosher, from a legal point of view at least. More than mere intermediaries, Peacock are staging the symposium, in the full dramaturgical sense. They laid down the rules of engagement some weeks ago: D&G’s team have been instructed to present ‘encomia’ into which they, the Peacocks, are permitted, frequently and at will, to interject, interrogating their theses, premises, presuppositions and so on; the D&Gs, thus challenged, will elaborate, expand, extrapolate – and out of all this back-and-forth, like fragile truth wafting about the Agora at the end of a Socratic dialogue, to be breathed in and feasted on by all, will arise some peerless understanding of the current state of patent and copyright law; or at least of the parts of it falling within today’s (disorientatingly vague) remit-parameters – namely, those of ‘gesture’. It’s being filmed, the whole exchange, recorded for eventual viewing by other consultants back at Peacock and, presumably, this Client A themselves, who’ll trawl its contents for strategy prompts or market-recognition tools or whatever else it is they’re after. Whence Dean’s apprehension of this other, older scene, this object-sorting skit: in both scenarios, the players are simultaneously acting and not acting, doing what they’re doing both because they’re doing it for real and as a show, put on for post-hoc viewing by an audience that’s lurking out of sight, beyond the frame …
There are, needless to say, big differences too – not least the props: in this state-of-the-art conferencing room, it’s on not a canvas pull-down but a 65-inch back-lit LED that the embedded scene is appearing. A video-clip, it shows a dancer in great bat-like silken wings twirling her arms, causing a web of floating ribbons to gyrate around her.
‘Loie Fuller,’ Dean’s colleague Julius Leman, mid-encomium, is telling Peacock’s delegation. ‘Creator of the “Serpentine Dance” she’s demonstrating here. She managed to patent the chemical compounds she used in her colour gels; and the salts that gave her cloths and stage sets their strange luminescence; but she never managed to patent the dance itself.’
‘Why not?’ Robert Elsaesser, Peacock’s point-man, asks.
‘The US Copyright Office,’ explains Julius, ‘denied her suit – in 1892, against an imitator, Minnie Bemis – on the grounds that her, Fuller’s, performance, irrespective of its groundbreaking uniqueness, had no overarching structure, wasn’t “about” anything …’
In the short pause while notes are jotted down, the dancer continues to twirl and gyrate. The gif, a digitised transfer from celluloid, has jumps and flecks, birthmarks of the old medium; like the spinning silks, it loops back on itself, over and over.
‘1892 …’ Elsaesser’s teammate Roderick picks up the baton. ‘Seems like a long way to track back.’
‘Copyright’s a long game, my friend,’ Clive Dorley, QC, murmurs across the table at him.
‘Naturally,’ Roderick concedes. ‘But maybe we could focus more on where the legislation’s going, not on where it’s come from.’
A collective under-the breath chortle, indulgent and patronising at once, issues from D&G ranks. The Peacocks, looking slightly hurt, retreat into the kind of silence that demands an explanation.
‘Law,’ Dorley provides one, ‘works on precedent.’
‘It’s Janus-faced.’ Juliet McKraken, Senior Partner, backs him up. ‘Looking backward to discern the future …’
Roderick’s objection overridden, Julius ploughs ahead by jumping back three centuries.
‘This lady,’ he announces as the screen gives over to a pale figure swathed in ermine and red velvet – static this time, jpeg of an oil painting – ‘is Queen Anne. Her 1710 decree, modestly titled “The Statute of Anne”, is technically to do with publishing, in that it endorses an author’s rights over and above those of the printer who puts out their book. But what it really does is set out a whole raft of statements and provisions tying landed property to immaterial thought, paternity to “personality”, private work to public interest …’
Dean, listening, fidgets with her own speaking notes, which seem trivial and unworked-through by comparison. She draws an arrow in their margin with her pencil for no other reason than to make the others think she’s annotating, fine-tuning some insight …
‘… via the legal deposit scheme.’ Julius is still in flow. ‘Very of its time. Part and parcel of the era of enlightenment and revolution. Seven decades later, the framers of the US Constitution more or less copy and paste the statute: Article 1, Section 8 – the “Copyright Clause” – applies at first to books and maps and charts; then printed music gets tagged on in 1831; then dramatic works in 1856 … photographs 1865 … movies 1912 … sound recordings 1972 (this one surprises people: you’d have thought sound would have come much sooner). Then – and here, perhaps, is what most concerns us – in 1976 a new Copyright Act extends protectable status to choreographic works and pantomimes.’
‘And that’s the latest upgrade?’ asks Elsaesser. ‘That’s where we’re at now?’
The D&G crew once more let loose a volley of indulgent-patronising chortles. Dorley quips: ‘If things were that simple we’d all be out of work.’
A pause, while Peacock’s delegation wait for the missing information to be supplied. Julius lets it run on for a few seconds, for effect, before taking up again:
‘This is what happens: after that last Act is passed, you start getting instances of litigation that, in turn, set precedent. So in 1977, the producers of a Broadway musical successfully sue a Hollywood studio when a dance is reproduced without permission in a film. But over the following years, several other suits fall flat. People find that when they try to copyright individual moves or “steps”, it doesn’t work.’
‘Why not?’ Elsaesser asks.
‘A step,’ Julius answers, ‘is an isolated unit, not a sequence. Think back to Queen Anne’s authors: they could copyright a book, but not a word. So a composer, now, can copyright a symphony, but not a note; a painter a painting, but not a brushstroke. It’s the same with movement. The devil’s in the detail, though: thousands of hours of court-time have been spent arguing about the exact point at which a unit turns into a sequence. It’s still up for grabs. And then, it gets more complex, on two fronts.’
He takes a sip of water. He’s got the floor, and wants to hold it for a while.
‘Firstly,’ he resumes, wiping his lips, ‘there’d already been successful acts of registering and litigation prior to 1976, the year choreographic copyright takes hold. Hanya Holm, a German émigré, managed to register her choreography for Kiss Me Kate in 1952. But that was thanks to having documented it in Labanotation – Rudolf Laban’s system for codifying dance moves, for recording them in scores: it was covered by the older law protecting written manuscripts. By the same token Johnny Hudgins, an African American, won compensation three decades earlier for blackface tributes to him performed here in London, on the grounds that they were drawn from a “dramatic composition”. That was an outlier, though.’
‘How so?’ asks Elsaesser.
‘This,’ Julius informs him, ‘was back in the 1920s – an important period, given the rise in stock of African-diaspora culture: Harlem Renaissance and all that … It brought two separate world views into conflict. The folks sharing moves in uptown New York ballrooms hadn’t inherited the same proprietorial notions as their European-descended counterparts. They’d come from chattel, after all, not held it. So they turn up at the Savoy and the Apollo on Saturday nights, tap and swing around together, unpacking and tweaking one another’s steps, and – hey presto! – the Lindy and the Charleston are born. But no one owns them. Then a downtown Broadway maestro gets inquisitive, or brave, and ventures north of 120th Street; and his eyes jump from their sockets; and before you know it all the sequences have been incorporated in some musical – whose producers copyright it. This pattern will continue in the entertainment world for decades: think of rock ’n’ roll, or hip-hop. Crudely put: white people nicking stuff from black people pretty much describes the history of popular music.’
A reflective, or perhaps embarrassed, silence follows. There are no black people in this room. Elsaesser moves things on by asking:
‘What’s the second front?’
‘The second front,’ says Julius, ‘hinges round a single word: derivative.’
‘Derivative,’ repeats Elsaesser.
‘Derivative,’ confirms Julius. ‘Copyright grants to its owner a bundle of entitlements: to display, perform, distribute and reproduce a work, and to create’ – he raises his fingers in inverted commas – ‘“works derivative of the original”. What does “derivative” mean?’
He pauses again. Was that a question? The Peacocks look at one another awkwardly before Elsaesser, spreading his palms, hands the unsolved riddle back to D&G.
‘Everything’s derivative of something else,’ says Julius. ‘Nothing comes from nowhere. Copyright disputes, in the choreographic field, have traditionally been argued on a genealogical basis, rather like paternity suits: if Work A can be demonstrated to have been the “father” or “grandfather” of Works B, C or D …’
On the long table, water glasses stand untouched, bubbles in them fewer, slower, smaller than before – third-generation stragglers, great-grandchildren of some lost spring. From ermine and velvet, Queen Anne looks on palely. It takes a few seconds for Elsaesser to frame the obvious question:
‘And how is that demonstrated?’
‘By having the best lawyers.’ Dorley’s older, wiser voice floats up from his chair’s recesses.
There’s a round of laughter, which, since Dorley doesn’t join it, soon dies out. He wasn’t joking.
‘Show them the K-pop case,’ McKraken instructs Julius.
Obediently, Julius calls up a file that’s lying minimised on his docking station. On the LED, Anne crumples out of view, a genie returned to her flask, to be replaced by a troupe of contemporary, floppy-haired Asian boys advancing in syncopated steps across a lunar landscape, chasing an elusive alien girl. These in turn are sucked away to docked oblivion as Julius pops another file and the scene changes – or, in fact, doesn’t: here, in grainier texture, is a striped and blanche-faced mimique performing, in similarly extraterrestrial environs, more or less identical movements.
‘D&G took on this case ourselves, three years ago, and won,’ Julius overdubs. ‘We acted for the estate of Jean-Louis Barrault, the French mime artist this band were ripping off. That they’re doing this is obvious. Self-evident. But in law, that’s nothing; it has no significance. What allowed Barrault’s descendants to prevail, despite the migration in medium, vaudeville to video-streaming, and the quite considerable time-lag, over fifty years … What swung it for them was the fact that Barrault, prior to his death, had – unusually – bought back all rights to his own work from the various producers who’d contracted him over the course of his career. If not, proprietorship would have been corporate rather than individual – and, to further muddy the waters, dispersed; it would be a matter of tracking down whichever outfits had acquired or inherited the holdings of whatever other outfits held them prior to that.’
During the last few moments, the Peacock gang have, in some kind of Pavlovian reaction to the content of his spiel, been sitting up straighter, straining forwards, eyes lit up with new levels of attentiveness. Are they actually breathing faster? It seems so to Dean, although it could just be the overheated ventilators on their laptops, or an uptick in the suite’s AC …
‘This,’ says Elsaesser, voice charged with more directed purpose, ‘is intriguing – in point of view of where Client A’s interests lie.’
‘Can you be more precise?’ McKraken asks.
Elsaesser, weighing his words, answers:
‘In corporate, rather than individual, ownership …’
‘… of movement, yes,’ says McKraken. ‘So we’ve understood – which is why we’ve asked Julius to paint the spectrum for you …’
‘A task he’s doing admirably,’ Roderick jumps in again here. ‘But I wonder: why are we hovering around dance and music? I mean … entertainment’s certainly part of the picture; but it’s not the focal point. Client A, as we’ve outlined, is more interested in these questions as they pertain to what we used to call “the industrial arena”.’
Dean, sensing that she’s going to be called on soon, tenses up.
‘The law,’ Dorley’s benevolently chiding voice weighs in once more, ‘works not just by precedent, but by analogy as well.’ The Peacocks look confused, so he continues: ‘Choreography may seem like a niche subject; but it’s the paradigm for all fields in which flesh and bones, bodies in motion, meet with the legal codifications that both support and constrain them; as such, choreographic legislation should be seen as the umbrella for all argument involving movement. Which, if I understand correctly, is precisely Client A’s concern.’
The Peacock team, quieted once more, sit back. Dean scrutinises them. Besides Elsaesser and Roderick, there are two others: a young woman about her age and a man in his mid-thirties who’s been taking notes continuously; plus the three camera people, two male and one female, filming the proceedings – one front-on, one from each side. They’re all got up in smart-casual attire: slim chinos, open shirts or jumpers topped by blazers for the men, jackets over patterned dress or jeans for the women. She’s checked Peacock’s website: they have lavish premises in Hammersmith – brainstorming studios, hospitality suites, summiting pods … D&G’s own offices in Goodge Street have two large rooms set aside for just this type of pow-wow. Why have they been Ubered out here, to this new-build Old Street flexi-hub with spaces hireable by month, or day, or hour? Despite the first-name informality, the free-flow format, the light, glassy airiness bathed in aroma of fair trade, she senses that this meeting has been crafted, from top down, not only to ensure that things are rigidly hermetic, but, beyond that, to confer upon itself, its own occurrence, a degree of anonymity, or – is it too much to think this? – of deniability …
McKraken says: ‘The principal difference between the worlds of dance and the more commercial applications that form Client A’s zone of enquiry is that, in the latter realm, it’s usually technology that’s patented; not human movements.’
‘Well, yes. Let’s …’ Roderick flips through his notes and, finding what he wants, strikes out on a fresh tack with newfound confidence: ‘Let’s take the scenario – the everyday one – whereby a person swipes a smartphone or a tablet. Right?’
McKraken nod-shrugs acquiescence.
‘Could we not,’ Roderick asks, ‘see that person themselves as the tool that opens up the file or application? The sweep of the hand or fingers, their particular configuration, could be thought of – in principle at least …’
‘As proprietorial?’ McKraken asks.
‘Why not? The action’s been devised by the device’s engineers, designers, programmers … In effect, it’s the true “content” of their work: the soft- and hardware are just trappings – props, or prompts. So although you perform the action, it’s their creation – the designers’; just as a given dance sequence is its choreographer’s. And yet, as we all know, a hand-motion or a gesture – even ones instantly identifiable as associated with a certain product or personality – isn’t afforded the same, or any, level of protection. Not yet …’
‘It’s a non-starter,’ Dorley cuts him off. ‘That line of thinking has reared its head from time to time over the last few years, and promptly had its bottom smacked and got sent to bed early. Heavy-metal singers trying to register their devil-horn signs, stuff like that … Those cases always fall at the first hurdle: frivolous, dismissed.’
‘Those ones, yes,’ Elsaesser concurs. ‘But at the more sophisticated – the more technological – end of the spectrum …’
‘Gesture-based interaction in HCI systems,’ Roderick starts reeling off a list he’s been holding back, powder-dry, until now. ‘Hand-topology and skeletal-data descriptors, encoded via Fisher kernels and multi-level temporal pyramids … Linear SVM classifiers applied to feature-vectors, computed over presegmented gestures to pluck recognition moments from continuous streams … We’re thinking of the type of work that companies like Bewegung and Kinect and Pantarey are doing.’
‘We’ve advised Pantarey,’ McKraken interjects.
‘We know you have,’ replies Elsaesser.
The dynamic’s shifting – Dean can sense that. Now it’s the D&G team who find themselves quieted by the Peacocks’ knowledge of the field, wrong-footed by their having kept it under wraps until this point, as though playing dumb had been a strategy to draw out their interrogees. She recalls vaguely the Pantarey contract, for which she prepared some of the secondary paperwork: it involved pre-emptive registration of a gizmo, some kind of high-speed, light-projecting camera. Are Client A a company like that? It seems unlikely: the length and expense to which they’ve gone in orchestrating this whole formalised exchange would place them further up whatever chain D&G find themselves part of here – a larger operator, tweaking cords from a far higher stratum, an atmosphere more rarefied …
It’s Elsaesser who lets the silence run on this time, then decides when and how to end it.
‘In all kinds of fields,’ he says, ‘gaming to manufacturing to warfare, gestural operation’s taking over from the joystick model that in turn replaced the hands-on one. What Client A is interested in interrogating – interested in speculating on, let’s say – is how this, over time, might impact our legal understanding of specific hum-tech interfaces. Not the gestures, but the interfaces; the configurations.’
‘If we move,’ Roderick again, ‘beyond the old dichotomy of man/machine, of operator/tool, and begin to view the whole thing instead as a … as a kind of constellation … held in formation by a force-of-gravity specific to its own context: a specific task, a particular design-moment, a uniquely-codified relation …’
He lets the thought hang in the air, held in formation by the force of its own logic. On the 65-inch, Barrault’s still alien-chasing on the moon, eyes round and bulging from the combined effects of atmosphere, lust and intoxication. McKraken, trying to wrest control of the proceedings back to D&G, turns towards Dean and says:
‘This might be a good moment …’
This is it. Julius is vacating his chair, yielding both floor and laptop to her. The slides are in there, uploaded already; still, there’s a false start while she toggles between thumbnails, reddening … Then it’s up on the widescreen: the first of the ancient photographs she’s copied, cropped, enlarged – though not enough, she’s sure, to make them anything other than small, flimsy offerings at this high table …
It shows a woman sitting next to a vast vat of chocolate. The woman herself, her form, is imprecise: her shoulders and arms have doubled, tripled, run into a blur of motion-shimmy, while her face has been erased almost completely, leaving discernable just the outline of a nose and sunken eye socket. Beside the vat, there’s a tray; on the tray sit thirteen little coils of chocolate – a baker’s dozen, bite-size dollops neatly laid out in two rows. Unlike the blurred human figure, objects – vat, tray, dollops – have remained in perfect focus; you can even see the craters and escarpments in the huge, half-set mass of unscooped chocolate, the declivities and trenches carved into its mudflat as it’s quarried. Running between vat and tray – slicing between them in both directions, just at the point at which the woman’s arm blurs most – is a streak of light so sharp that it looks solid: a continuous line, a track swerving and jagging as it races back round to rejoin itself and form a circuit.
‘A Cadbury’s worker,’ Dean tells the assembled company. ‘From the Gilbreth collection. This one,’ she continues, clicking to the next slide, ‘is a spanner driller.’
‘What collection?’ asks Elsaesser. ‘What is this exactly?’
On the screen, a ghost-figure, the wispy remnant of an overalled man, hangs between a crate of spanners and a fixed drill head. While the worker’s no more than a pall, both machine and spanner-crate have kept their form; hurtling electrically between these last two, where the ghost’s transparent fuzz of arm ends in a smoke-puff hand, there is – once more – a light track: multiple tracks this time, pursuing roughly but not exactly the same course, each one as bold and vibrant as a neon tube.
‘Gilbreth,’ says Dean. ‘Lillian Gilbreth. She worked first with her husband Frank and then alone, from the teens right through to the nineteen sixties, rationalising workplaces: shop floors, assembly lines, eventually whole industries. Back in their day, the Gilbreths were minor celebrities; there was even a film made about them, their family life. Now they’ve lapsed into obscurity, but …’
‘What are those light tracks?’ Roderick asks.
‘They’re called cyclegraphs,’ Dean tells him. ‘She – Gilbreth – developed the technique of attaching a light-ring to the finger of a seamstress or machinist, and allowing this, through long-exposure photographs, to trace the shape their hand made as they went about their task.’
‘Why’s this one broken?’ asks Elsaesser as, in the next picture, an ectoplasmic haze of laundry woman floats above two stacks (one crumpled and one tidily arranged) of handkerchiefs. This time, the tracks of light running, just off the midriff of her dwindling body, to and fro between the sharply defined linen piles are formed of Morse-like dots and dashes.
‘Gilbreth,’ explains Dean, ‘has used an interrupter here to have the light blink on and off – quickly, ten times per second. That way, the long exposure will reveal not just the path the woman’s hand makes, but also how long it takes to make it. That’s the point, the object of the exercise. Manual labour is repetitive; a handkerchief folder, or lathe operator, or what have you, will perform the same action again and again, thousands of times a day. With her cyclegraphs, Gilbreth could demonstrate that each “doing”, every iteration of the action, involves the worker’s hand travelling (for example) three feet and two inches, and takes 4.1 seconds. More importantly, it allowed her to work out that, if the worker’s employers were to lower the workbench by an inch and a half, and move it a little closer to, or further away from, the machine, or tools, or product, then they could bring that action’s cycle down to two feet and eleven inches, and 3.6 seconds. Multiply that saving by however many thousand for each worker’s day; then by three hundred for their year; and then that figure by the company’s roster …’
‘But …’ Roderick’s not convinced. ‘A photograph is flat. How can it measure distance? You’d need depth.’
Dean has the answer to this quibble at her fingertips, one of which brings up the next slide.
‘Stereoscope,’ she comments – unnecessarily: the picture is a diptych, showing an index card-stamper’s action (an arced light track, like the outline of a trout or salmon leaping up a stream) from two sides, front and profile. ‘But,’ she presses on, ‘Gilbreth went further: once you have what she called a “stereocyclegraph”, then you can make a three-dimensional model of the action. Look …’
Now there are four boxes on the screen: cut-away boxes, black, whose three sides (always the floor and two right-angled walls) are wallpapered with white graph squares. Mounted inside each box is a careening light track; this time, though, these tracks appear solid not just through a trick of shutter-time, but because this is what they are – genuinely solid, shaped from moulded frames of metal fixed in place with little hooks which, if you squint, you can just see. In one of the four tracks, the bright metal circuit has dark stripes painted at half-inch intervals around it to recreate the interrupted blink-effect seen in the last-but-one image.
‘By producing physical iterations,’ Dean says, ‘Gilbreth could help workers learn the best way to perform their action – by running their hands along the moulds cast from their most efficient colleagues, for example … She could also tweak the casts, the wireframes, themselves, to improve the modelled action further – often in collaboration with the workers, with an eye to their own comfort. It’s no good having a more efficient hand-path if it makes the woman’s back give out after three years. More enlightened companies like Cadbury’s, a Quaker family business, understood this. Plus, if the woman’s back lasts ten years rather than three, then she’s more profitable, too: you don’t need to keep training up replacements.’
She clicks through two more photos of assorted wireframes in their boxes. Their shapes morph through a large range: some are suggestive of a roller-coaster track, others of cowboy hats with rims and peaks, others of trunked or long-necked creatures – elephants, giraffes – or antennaed insects, or snakes uncoiling, frozen in mid strike … At the base of every picture there’s a string of numbers and letters, squiggles that look like miniature sketches of the outline beneath which they’re scrawled.
‘How big are these boxes?’ asks Elsaesser.
‘Like shoeboxes, I guess,’ she answers. ‘The action’s modelled at scale, one-to-one.’
‘And how many of them are there?’
‘I don’t know. She kept on producing them for decades. But lots of them were discarded after they’d served their purposes. From what I could make out from the records I saw, it looks like the Smithsonian have gathered up a few. MIT, too. But the main Gilbreth Archive’s held at Purdue, where she …’
‘With who?’
‘The University of Purdue, Indiana. They helped facilitate her research, after 1940 at least …’
Dean’s finger hovers on the mousepad, itching to click on to the next picture. But there’s no next picture; that’s her lot. She’s played her hand, got nothing else. She reddens again, unsure of what to do with the display, control of which she’s now relinquishing; then decides to revert to Julius’s last slide, the gif of the moonstruck Barrault. No one in the room says anything; the Peacock people don’t even seem to be taking notes. Dean senses that her presentation’s been a flop; she’s about to excuse herself, to slink off to the toilet, when Roderick asks:
‘Would you say …?’ He pauses, then reformulates the question: ‘Would you see these models as a kind of “first citation”?’
‘Legally?’ she asks.
Roderick nods.
‘I suppose that would have to be argued, like the K-pop case – although it’s not the same. I mean …’
‘Maybe,’ Elsaesser adds, ‘they could be viewed as an alternative form of Labanotation – sculptural rather than written. They record a sequence.’
‘Yes,’ says Dean. ‘But …’
She finds herself too flustered to pay much attention to the rest of her faltering answer, which in any case is drowned out by other conversations striking up around the room, a mishmash of exchanges, crescendoing, separating out and coming back together.
‘… that with music,’ Julius is saying, ‘it’s more codified: since the Dubset Agreement, streaming’s become standardised, IP-wise. You’ve got your MixSCAN algos scanning traffic, distributing royalties and so on … But movement, of the type Client A’s interested in … We’re still in Wild West times in terms of any generalised …’
‘… when legislation’s going to come,’ Elsaesser’s reasoning. ‘It has to: might be two, five or ten years downstream, but …’
‘The notion,’ Dorley’s still in pooh-poohing mode, ‘that one could apply the same criteria universally to movement as to music-downloads is quite fanciful. How would you …?’
‘Sure: but the constellation,’ Roderick trots out his buzzwords again, ‘the moment, the designed relation … Now, with motion-capture heading markerless, and viewing capability pretty much everywhere – why can’t the algos scan that too, in all types of …’
‘… in on the ground floor,’ Elsaesser’s impressing upon McKraken. ‘Future patenting, or maybe retrospective acquisition …’
For the remaining minutes of the meeting, Dean finds herself picturing, once more, the spools she saw a week ago: the circled layers, stacked like orders or committees, each layer overseeing the one below, reporting to the one above, but unable to see the one above that, or the next … The image stays with her on the ride back to Goodge Street, and all afternoon – and resurrects itself the following week, when Dorley summons her into his office.
‘It seems,’ he tells her, ‘that your little wireframes struck a chord.’
‘With whom?’ she asks.
‘With Peacock,’ he says. ‘Client A. Whomever. They want more.’
‘More what?’
‘More,’ Dorley repeats. ‘I’d like you to explore that avenue a little further. I thought you could take up where you left off.’
‘Explore …’ she starts, then falters. ‘What exactly should I do?’
‘I think,’ says Dorley, ‘you should get yourself a plane ticket to Indiana.’