borderlands

Rainy Sunday afternoon copyright law study at Borderlands Cafe, Valencia between 19th and 20th. No music, no wifi, brightly lit, big windows, clean couches, recliners, blue-shade bankers' lights on wooden tables, resonating hardwood floors. Like studying with thirty other people at your shared kitchen table. Believer and Foreign Affairs and Yoga Today and coffee and pastries for sale.

Things observed:

• South Asian man, late-20s, with a Facebook logo backpack and thumbs on a smartphone and a periodical called Game Developers.
• Two white women, mid-20s, one typing on a computer with a sticker of a fist clutching a radish on it. Both are reading reproductive rights manuals. A third woman joins and says, "Huge conference this week on contraceptive technology." She is reading a book called Tel Aviv Stories. I make eye contact. I smile.
• Man and woman on couch talking about the design on the copy of the Great Gatsby she just bought next door: "I'm glad the publisher didn't succumb to the modern cover."
• Four skinny-necked white men, early to mid-twenties, sitting at one table silently, hunched over paperbacks; the bookstore adjacent to the cafe exclusively sells science fiction.
• Five foot tall transman with tufted goatee enters, leaves door open. Woman in knee-length felted sweater rises to shut it.
• Nose-pierced 45 year-old baristo calls "Decaf!" and I rise to fetch a cup.
• Leather fedora enters, surveys seating situation, leaves. Woman asleep on armchair with mouth open, book in lap.
• White man with Asian woman enter. Asian man with white woman and hapa baby in colorful stroller walk past the window. White man with Asian man sit next to me, reading matching his and his New Yorkers. I make eye contact. I smile.
• Heavyset man with unkempt hair has the word "haircut" written on his hand.
• A couple at a window table peck.
• Asian girl, mostly eyelash, rifles through gold crepe Shiseido tote bag for a battered copy of a psychology textbook.
• Piece of conversation: "I moved here in 1996, at the height of the boom, to work on text-based paging services."
• Seventy year old white man with footlong beard and stoned affect says to me, when his conversation partner leaves for the bathroom, "These chairs are so comfortable!" I make eye contact. I smile, then return very quickly to Perfect 10 v. Google.

When the man with the footlong beard's conversation partner returns, they have this exchange:

Her: The body has a system for restocking the flow of cranialsacral fluids.

Him: Oh yes. Once I was dancing with this woman. She put her arm around my body. And I can't describe the feeling of her arm except to say - her arm was my tongue. When we were dancing, whatever we were touching and tasting and sensing with our tongues was strong. Our whole bodies connected - as tongues. It's just a name for an area. But what I mean to say is, our bodies were . . . enormous . . . tongues. It's the best way I can think about it.

Her: It's very sensitive. If you are one with your body, it is very sensitive. That's why we feel such pain.

Him: Attend to the pain.

Her: Attend to the hurt.

I put my nose in Perfect 10 v. Google (9th Cir. 2003). Google image search pulls up thumbnail images of porn site's copyrighted photographs, and inline linked full-size images of the same. Porn site sells thumbnail images of porn to mobile users, so Google's images presumptively carve into market for theirs. Still, this is fair use, not copyright infringement, which is why you can still look at thumbnails of perfect ten vulvas using a humble Google search.

But I took notes on conversations as much as I took notes on cases. I missed my stupid fucking girlfriend and I wanted her to see all of this. I thumbed my Blackberry every ten minutes looking for signs of life. Nothing. I left after three hours.