Con Job Read Free

“She’s got to be in costume, with that badge, but I can’t place it.”
    “You can’t recognize everyone, not at a mixed con like this. Too many fandoms.”
    “No, this is something I know. It’ll come to me in the middle of the night or something.”
    They passed the row of video rooms, mostly empty this early in the convention. Jacob slowed to read down the schedule of the first, hoping against reason that Ice War would be on it. No such luck; the room was presently screening season two of Battlestar Galactica .
    “Jacob.”
    He glanced up, caught by Samantha’s tone. She was standing outside the door of the second room, looking inside, and as he watched her eyes shifted to catch his.
    He took a few steps to join her and looked in at the enormous screen which should have been, per the schedule posted on the easel outside, showing the Tenth Doctor. Instead, a fat woman and a chubby, bleached-blond little boy were screaming at one another.
    Jacob’s stomach clenched and for a moment he couldn’t breathe.
    On the screen, the little boy turned and yanked down his elastic-waist pants, mooning the shouting woman with barely-pixelated buttocks.
    Jacob crossed the empty room to the DVD player and slapped the eject button. The disc which came out wasn’t commercial, just someone’s home-burned copy with permanent marker spelling out Cougars and Cold Ones . Jacob snapped the DVD in half and threw the pieces into the trash can in the corner.
    “Right,” Sam said. “No telling where that came from. Somebody’s idea of a practical joke.” She took a breath. “We going to Sergio’s panel?”

Chapter Two
    Sergio’s session was supposed to be on the import and translation process to bring foreign media to the US, but judging from the abandoned slide about distribution channels on the over-sized wall screen, the discussion had gone its own way. Samantha flipped a little wave at Sergio as they took seats in the back, but he didn’t seem to see them. The room wasn’t large, but it was nearly full.
    “The point is,” a guy in a printed Mr. Spock t-shirt said, “you don’t own the rights. We don’t own the rights. It’s the creators’ call, and if they don’t want to share a show, they don’t have to.”
    “I totally agree with you about creators’ rights,” Sergio said, his voice terse, “absolutely, but the problem is, it’s not always the creators who are making that call.”
    “But—”
    “Let me use an example,” Sergio interrupted. “Let’s take Mr. Doobles as a case study. Has everyone heard of Mr. Doobles ? It’s a cute little Japanese show about a bunch of kids who draw stories together, has a cult fandom probably beyond what it deserves, though I could get flamed in some circles for that. It was licensed for the US by Pop Culture, but when they started having money problems a few years ago they shelved most of their family-friendly stuff and bet on the Death March franchise to save them. Sound familiar, you with me? Well, it didn’t work, they went under, and last year MEGAN!ME acquired the Pop Culture catalog, including Mr. Doobles .”
    Heads bobbed around the room; a lot of the audience knew this story.
    “So internet explosion, hooray, Mr. Doobles is going to be released again! Because Pop Culture had been a few years behind the overseas releases and everyone wanted what they’d been missing. But MEGAN!ME didn’t release anything.”
    “Here he goes,” murmured Sam with a suppressed smile.
    “You tell ‘em, Sergio,” Jacob whispered back.
    “In fact, not only did they not release any of the backlogged Mr. Doobles , they put out a statement saying they had no plans to release any new Mr. Doobles material in the foreseeable future. But then they started issuing cease-and-desist letters to fans who were translating scripts of overseas releases.”
    “Yeah!” called someone from the front rows. “Like that show about the radio station, where they lied about the fan mail so