The internet did not believe it. The collective consciousness of the blogsphere, the chatter was conclusive, the powers that be could not stop file sharing.

Information must flow freely, but the lawmakers had the power to damn that river, sever the connections, and the corporations had the muscle – the money to make sure that it happened.

Technological change advanced. Memory augmentation meant that every living moment of our days were recorded by our mobile devices – our clothes came with wireless camera’s and mic’s as a matter of course, heck you had to and shop vintage if you wanted dumb fabric, everything had smart weave, from jeans to the bio-plastic panels on the car.

All this information was backed up to our servers, thought controlled interfaces meant the editing and presentation of that slapstick moment when grandma fell over the dog on youtube was mere impulse away.

The thought police were draconian. It was a logical extension of the laws against file sharing, heard that piece of music, while it was perfectly recorded in your personal ‘CLIC’ - cybernetic link interfacing computer ( grown for you from your own neurons; no rejection and perfect memory ) this didn’t meant you couldn’t share it - but uploading copyrighted content from your own subconscious ie talking or file sharing as they lawyers insisted on calling it - without payment was illegal.

So if you told your friends about the movie you saw you paid the industry it’s fee, every thought was tracked, every copyrighted word logged. Every time you sang Happy Birthday the Disney Corporation got richer.

“Remember” the warnings began, “Intellectual Property Rights are protected in law, you do not own your memories of copyrighted material, accessing memories, containing copyrighted intellectual properties incurs a fee, deducted from your account automatically for your convenience.”