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APPROACHING ZERO

In the hallway outside the small courtroom Jim sat beside Popp's parents, a friendly and courteous pair. 'Do you like Cleveland?' Popp's mother asked. Jim wasn't sure; all he had seen by then was the airport, a hotel room and the hallway.

Inside the court Jim had his first glance at Joseph Popp. His hair was long and unkempt, his beard had grown out, the grey more emphatic. He shuffled around the courtroom, wearing a shabby jacket, a sweater and faded jeans. He looked, said Jim later, 'like a lost soul'.

Popp's mental state was the crux of the defence's argument in the extradition hearings: his lawyers argued that he had suffered a nervous breakdown and was unfit to stand trial. Popp never denied writing the AIDS trojan nor sending out the diskettes. But at the time, his lawyers said, he was in the grip of his mental illness and was behaving abnormally.

The lawyers also argued that the demand for a licence fee for the use of the diskette was not tantamount to blackmail. It was, they agreed, somewhat extreme to wreck a computer's hard disk if the user didn't pay, but operators were warned not to load the diskette if they didn't accept the terms and conditions laid down in the instruction leaflet. And it was quite clearly stated on the same sheet that if they used the diskette and didn't pay, the computer 'would stop functioning normally'.

There was a basis in law to the argument. Software publishers have long struggled to stop the unauthorized use and copying of their copyright programs. Software piracy is said to cost American publishers $5 billion a year and many markets - Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Brazil, India and even Japan, among others - have become what are euphemistically referred to as 'single-disk' countries: in other words, countries where one legitimate copy of a software program is bought and the rest illegally copied. To combat piracy, publishing houses have used a number of devices: some programs, for example, contain deliberate 'errors', which are triggered at set intervals - say, once every year - and which require a call from the user to the publisher to rectify. The publisher can then verify that the user is legitimate and has paid his licence fee before telling him how to fix it.

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