It may not even take cops: A mere author can rev up a search engine and do a half-decent job of finding bootleg copies for sale. Indeed, if bootleggers aren't findable by search engine, you have to wonder just how thriving a business they'll be able to do.

Some people imagine that a black market can be sustained via servers that are offshore, beyond the reach of U.S. authorities. Maybe. But world history contains lots of examples of nations working together to overcome such jurisdictional challenges. Only last century, there was no clear law keeping American publishers from bootlegging copies of Darwin's The Origin of Species. But now Britain--and the United States--have lots of intellectual-property treaties that prevent this sort of thing. Existing extradition treaties could help to bring foreign bootleggers to heel. In some cases, it may seem hard to imagine transnational agreements that are up to the challenges posed by cyberspace. For example, some of them may have to be truly global to work. But all kinds of current international treaties would have been hard to imagine a century or two ago. Never underestimate the ability of capitalism to make the world safe for itself.

What about the way bootleggers can play cat and mouse, putting their hot copies first on one server, run by unsuspecting Internet Access Company A, then moving them to a server run by unsuspecting Company B? Or what about the way they can use anonymous re-mailers to conceal their identity? Well, it may not seem perfectly just to hold companies A and B--or the person running the anonymous retailer--accountable, but it's far from unimaginable. As intellectual-property scholar Peter Swire of Ohio State Law School has pointed out, a parallel precedent exists in the world of photocopying. Having been hit by a copyright-infringement lawsuit, Kinko's now appraises the reprint orders it gets and rejects some of them as potentially illegal. Is it really fair to make Kinko's a surrogate cop? Maybe not, but it's happened. As Swire notes, "pressure points" comparable to Kinko's can be found in any economy, no matter how much of it is in cyberspace.

By the way, Swire also noted an interesting example of the dropping cost of obtaining data legally. When your dentist's office plays a Muzak tape of Beatles' hits, your dentist is supposed to pay a tiny royalty to--well, to Michael Jackson, but that's another story. Anyway, there are two organizations that represent the owners of musical rights and try to get dentists to pay up: ASCAP and BMI. And now they both have Web pages that simplify the process of finding out who owns the copyrights and paying them what they're due. And that process will get way simpler still once digital cash gets real--which, in fact, it already is; Cybercash opened shop this month. (Barlow, presumably writing before these Web pages existed, cited the difficulty of recouping music royalties to bolster his case.)

Finally: What about cryptography as a mask for bootlegging? Again: The more cryptic the product, the harder it will be for customers to find it.