“I’m not here to star,” I said, “just to testify. Have you read my proposal?” He said he had seen the prepared testimony I had left at the entrance to the auditorium. “But what about the thousands of words I sent you on the Net? I thought you’d have a look and—” “Excuse me,” he said and moved on. His Hollywood analogy would strike me later as all too apt, for this was shaping up as a TV-centric NII that favored television and movies over books. Al Gore later would not hold his grand information summit at the Library of Congress; no, he would jet off to Hollywood and to a speech punctuated by jokes with a comedienne. There in the Crystal City auditorium, I saw a tall, gray-haired man surrounded by a cluster of other people. Heads bobbed. Stephen Metalitz was a lawyer and a power in the Information Industries Association, the IIA. “Welcome, Steve,” Lehman greeted his first witness in a voice that told me who the true star of the day was. The rest of the hearing unfolded as I now feared. Witnesses from trade associations pounded away at the same theme again and again. Copyright law needed to be friendly to megaconglomerates or they would never bless the dataways with their _Terminator_ films. It was as if the Internet, already starting to bristle with small businesses, never existed. I heard some cogent testimony from some fine people representing librarians and educators, but all in all, I might as well have been at an IIA convention. Lehman’s panel of bureaucrats, some of them strangers to copyright law, just about dozed off during my testimony. Chatting with me informally, certain industry witnesses were more curious about my ideas than were the Feds. It wasn’t just to size up the opposition. For my plan would divert resources from bureaucracy to knowledge, and could actually _help_ many members of the information industry. A potential obstacle rose ahead, though: the hostility of real, live bureaucrats. During a break I approached a working-group member from one of the most bureaucratic agencies of them all, the General Services Administration. “What do you think of my ideas for electronic forms?” I asked. “I remember when you guys let a senator benefit illegally from a federal lease on an office building. Imagine what you could have done with better technology to help flag stuff like that.” “Oh,” he said coldly, “we can just train our contracting officers better.” Better to protect jobs for bureaucrats like him than to offer affordable e-books for schoolchildren. My foremost opponent, however, as I learned eventually, just may have been Lehman himself—the chairman of the Intellectual Property Working Group, which would help set copyright policy for America’s dataways.