The wizardry of MPEG would be useless if people didn’t use it. And it took a meeting of Patterson and Lord in the supermodel group—not one devoted to Bible study, or to paeans to Bill Clinton or Al Gore, or to the mandarins of Singapore—for IUMA to give MPEG one of its biggest boosts on the Net. Why, horror of horrors, Patterson and Lord just may have wanted to scan and swap _copyrighted_ photos of Kate Moss. One way or another MPEG would become important on the Net, but thanks to people like these two, it was happening far faster than it would have otherwise. Technology was at odds with the vested interests of record companies, and they knew it. At around the same time IUMA was getting under way in fall 1993, lobbyists for the companies and performing artists were fighting for laws that could lead to onerous pay-per-listen schemes—while publishers were trying to lay the basis for pay-per-read. Indeed, business people and creators should receive fair compensation, especially the creators; but in the zeal to protect major political contributors from the entertainment industry, bureaucrats and lawyers could imperil technology in the most lethal of ways. Bruce Lehman, Bill Clinton’s intellectual property czar, would prove it later with a stunningly oppressive proposal called the Green Paper, a technophobic lawyer’s wetdream, a techie’s nightmare. The first song the Ugly Mugs put on the Net was called ”_Arbeit Macht Frei_”—German for “Work will make you free.” A punky carnival song, it sparked an instant debate on free speech. Asked about the title, Patterson told me, “It was kind of born out of our frustration of, ‘In order to have the money to do everything that we want to do, we have to work, but if we work, we can’t do anything we want to do.’ So it was kind of like commenting on people’s attitude of, ‘If you work you’ll be able to do what you want to do,’ when actually you won’t be able to do what you want to, because you’ll be working. Actually it wasn’t a smart song title. It was a phrase that was over the gate on the way to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Unfortunately, people took it to be this Nazi song, which is actually completely the opposite of what we meant. “We got responses from people who flamed me because they thought it was extremely cruel to be using this as a name for a song and taking it all lighthearted when it actually meant something serious to a lot of people. Whenever anyone actually wrote to me, I usually sent them back the lyrics and explained our stance, why it was called that. It definitely created enough of a stir among the few people who heard it. You wonder if a label would ever take a chance with something like that.”