As you know, the new Mogwai album titled Mr. Beast appeared on peer-to-peer networks long before its official release.
Nowadays, this happens pretty often with popular mass culture goods due to the unscrupulousness of journalists who receive promo copies like the ones I wrote about in the first part. It also frequently happens that the album gets pirated by the very studio workers where it's being recorded. Apparently, the aforementioned categories of citizens haven't read comic books about copyright, or they just don't believe them. By the way, I scored some of those at the patent library today.
The first one (about copyright) is about a chubby little blond guy with a guitar named Marko, who dreams of becoming a musician. But Marko's parents disapprove of this way to make a living, considering artists to be parasites and deadbeats. The guy meets an Indian biker chick in cowboy boots with the curves of a Barbie doll and a rudimentary knowledge of jurisprudence. She spells it out for him loud and clear that selling thin air (like CDs or DVDs) is an extremely lucrative business, and that they'll make serious bank peddling guitar strumming to gullible suckers.
The next two booklets talk about patents and trademarks, the intricacies of which Marko grasps with the help of his friends - a punky Chinese guy and a mulatto girl with three eyes and two mouths, whom you can see on the cover in the center photo.
All the booklets end exactly the same way - the merry gang joyfully yells: "Long live copyright!" and "We're gonna make a lot of money!"
I treat the modern copyright system as a necessary evil, and such malicious brainwashing strikes me as suspicious. So I paranoiacally searched the booklets' publisher list for the famous bogeymen of our time - RIAA, MPAA, and BSA. These outfits run protection for the corporations raking in dough off mass culture consumers. The first one is in charge of coming down on music pirates, the second handles the movie ones, and the third takes care of software. I couldn't track down any sinister liberpunk abbreviations; the comics were published under the aegis of European state structures using the PHARE fund's money, which nowadays in the Baltics is being milked by anyone who isn't completely lazy.
The story kind of rolled off sideways, I got too lazy to continue, and so the ending will be tomorrow.