"That or become publishers, I think. I'd guess an academy library would have enough pull not to be charged with frivolous connections to crimes."

"Hi, uh, I heard there was an emergency meeting?"

"Welcome, Delegate Ferrer. A censorship bill is, unfortunately, certain to pass today; I'd rather it be one more moderate and reasonable than simply banning every work not approved by a royal censorship board that does not yet exist, which I believe to be the alternative should the Rights committee not provide a better one. Would you care to read the draft?"

"Well, yeah," she tells Theopho, "but they'd have to have six thousand gold, which doesn't even - actually, can you just - we were talking on the education committee about the possibility of somewhat expanding access to the libraries run by the government," to insane proportions but let's not get into that here, "and - do you think it makes sense to consider books owned by government services a special case, and allow such books to be copied? I suppose that's currently handing a lot of unchecked power to academy librarians, who were selected for - an adjacent skill, but not precisely this one. Maybe we can talk more about it in education and get it added later, if it's too much for now. Create, like, the ability to authorize someone as a government academic who can purchase unauthorized works and add them to government collections if warranted, and allow anyone to produce copies from a government work. That's... sort of like a censorship board, I guess?"

Victòria doesn't think censorship is unfortunate as long as the bill is censoring things that are actually bad and not, like, saying no one can ever criticize the nobility. 

"Yes, do you have a copy?"

Sure, right here!

Victòria looks over the proposal. She's a fast reader; it doesn't take long. About halfway down, she stops, does some figuring on her fingers, and frowns, before returning to the draft.

She circles the bond amount. "I'm not sure you realize quite how much money this is for someone who isn't an archduke?" More likely he does know, and is doing it on purpose, but — the azata thought he wasn't going out of his way to be Evil on purpose, it's theoretically possible it was an accident. "Like, my mother earned a couple silver a day. Even if she didn't have to spend it on anything, she could work her whole life and never be able to afford six thousand gold. As written this restricts publishing to important nobles, and maybe a few very rich people — most of whom got rich doing Evil things under Asmodeus, which seems like the opposite of who anyone should want deciding things. Like, I definitely think it makes sense to have some kind of rule about who can set up a print shop, but not, uh, one that says only important nobles and Mammonites can do it — if you want to be sure you can, uh, punish people with fines, you could require the fee but set it to an amount that a normal person might ever be able to afford? ...And then maybe you could... make people say under an Abadar's Truthtelling that they aren't going to break the law and aren't going to try to get innocent people killed and aren't going to try to convince people to be Evil, and, uh, I don't know how you'd say it but, know enough not to accidentally get innocent people killed, and anything else we can think of, for things people shouldn't be allowed to print?"

She moves her pen to the exceptions for personal correspondence. "And this might already be covered by the rules about letters, but I think you should write it out explicitly — I talked to Feliu the paladin yesterday, and he said if there's a really big problem that you need to tell the Queen about, like if your nobles are still making people worship Asmodeus, you're supposed to 'petition' her, which is where you write a letter to the Queen, and her servants will read it and decide if it's important and tell her about it if it is. And I think we should say explicitly that it's definitely legal to petition the Queen, even though it might be read by a bunch of her servants first.

...and I'm also confused about — on the first day you were saying people should be allowed to try to convince other people to worship Asmodeus, and this is a lot more rules then I'd've thought you'd ever be okay with. But that's probably not important, just confusing." (She does, actually, think it's important, but if she says "I'm worried that you're going to vote one way on proposals in committee and another way on the floor" that kind of gives away what she's concerned about.)

"I think it is too much for now," Jilia says to Korva, "Though I'm definitely not opposed to enabling academies to have extra censorship boards, the proposal I brought to His Grace relied more heavily on things like that."

"Okay, I will think about long term academic library stuff over in Education. Right now I think you just want to make sure the existing academies can continue functioning with the books they have, and I'm unclear whether this allows that."

....did Xavier say people should be allowed to worship Asmodeus? That doesn't sound right. Did she say that? She's suddenly uncertain. Surely last week's Korva had some sense.

The six thousand gold to publish is obviously intended to prevent almost anyone from publishing new things, but can you really expect anyone to be allowed to publish new things that say anything controversial? Not particularly. Though she still needs to ask about the other countries thing when there's time.

"The price is as high as it is out of a belief that the higher the price is the more conservatives will vote for the bill," he says frankly. "And I'd rather have freer language, but after the pamphlet that started a riot on the Third I don't think it's politically practical to pass any law that guarantees freedom of the pen. We could have passed it on the second; we cannot today, not with three hundred civilians' blood on the pen of one liar.

"And I doubt the crisis will be as bad as you think. And I think that the Church of Abadar will offer to fund any bonds posted by themselves at low rates to anyone who they trust to publish nothing likely to start a riot, so I don't think it will just be archdukes and adventurers who can open print shops. If I'm wrong, we can suggest an amendment in two months, once the more moderate conservatives realize that nothing overtly untoward has been thus published legally."

He smiles about the "talked to Feliu" bit, though. "I agree that there should be an explicit exception for a right of petition, thank you for bringing this up. We should add that to the bill." It's very fortunate for their working relationship that she came up with something not stupid to add.

She looks at Delegate Soler. "Uh, you're Lawful, right, if you went to the Church of Abadar and asked for six thousand pounds to start a print shop, do you think they would ever give it to you, that sounds like an insane amount of money for them to just lend someone but I guess I don't know for sure—"

"- I don't know an Abadaran from a hole in the ground and furthermore can't really read, I'm not quite the example you might want."

"The six thousand gold," as he points out, "would remain in the Church's vaults, lent by them to you only to deposit to them."

"The Church of Iomedae will have a press, and so will the Abadarans themselves, and Sarenrae, Shelyn I think they'd charge more interest but she'd call it worth it. I wouldn't be surprised if Irori has one, and Torag if he ever sends anyone to Taggun Hold, and if Pharasma's church wants one they'll get one. They won't trust Milani or Calistria or any Evil church and if I want a Caydenite press I'm going to have to fund it myself, but it will not be mostly nobility, certainly not if you count by number of books made."

"So, the thing I'm worried about is — let's say you have someone who's publishing something totally reasonable and definitely not going to cause riots, but that criticizes the nobility or says they should have fewer special rules that give them better treatment. Like saying that we shouldn't have travel passes, or that nobles who break the law should get the same legal, non-mob-based punishment as everyone else, or that the dues you have to pay the nobles should be lower, or things like that. I don't think people should be allowed to say that people should go murder all Hellspawn, that's terrible, and — I don't even think it should be legal for us to have made a pamphlet of Valia's speech, if we'd done that, because apparently a bunch of people thought it meant they should kill innocent people. For some reason.

If you can find me a normal random person who makes normal person amounts of money and isn't a noble, and I guess also isn't a priest of Abadar, who thinks the Church of Abadar would lend them six thousand pounds for it, then I guess that part is fine. Or if you wanted to give a person like that six thousand pounds to set up a print shop that would also be fine? But I think that if you think the Church of Abadar would give out a loan like that to an ordinary person, even a really Lawful ordinary person who knew exactly what things would cause problems, you're, uh, doing the noble thing where you don't realize what things are like for normal people."

"Avenger, you cannot win this. All you can win is killing this proposal in favor of the one that doesn't allow anything that hasn't gotten personal Crown approval. You're entitled to vote against it, but we have a time limit here. I request a vote on whether to keep the current six thousand gold piece surety deposit or continue arguing it. I vote to keep it."

"...As chair, request granted. I also vote to keep. If it got to the floor without them I'd vote in favor, but we'd lose all but a dozen other nobles and two-thirds of everyone else."

"Abstain."

"Keep." 

"Keep, but I want to note that I do think this will destroy domestic publishing of more than a very narrow band of new works."

" - actually, wait, can we vote on stuff without Enric? I guess we meet the basic committee requirements."

"If everyone else is voting to keep it then it doesn't matter but I'm not — thinking of this as a fight? Like, right now Delegate Requena i Cortes and I don't agree about what it would do to normal people, but if he really doesn't want to just make it so that only nobles can publish then... I mean, I could be wrong about what the Church of Abadar would do! I don't know very much about the Church of Abadar! But — I don't know how to explain this right, but — if Delegate Requena i Cortes is writing the law because he thinks the Church of Abadar would do one thing, and it would actually do another, that seems like it would be... good for him to know? Even if he thinks it would be worth it either way but especially if he doesn't? And I guess if he's secretly just trying to make it so that only nobles and rich Asmodeans and I guess also the churches can publish, I'd rather he just say so, but I don't think he necessarily is, I don't want to just assume it of him—

—also, wait, yeah, where's Delegate Porras? I heard he died in the riots but I thought the archmages were — bringing everyone back—" 

(Did he get to Heaven and decide he'd rather just stay there? It doesn't — seem like the sort of thing that should be upsetting — despite this, it's still very upsetting—)

"There's probably an Abadaran to be had if we need one."

"That passes, then, since I don't know that Delegate Porras is alive or where he might be. Avenger, anything that lets most people publish is going to be voted down. This will at least let established people in a community publish and be able to approve writings by others they know."

"Right, libraries and audiences. I'm inclined to say an audience of eight is small in such a way as to leave it open to the courts if larger numbers still count as small."

"...this is a dumb question and if we have a time limit I don't want to slow us down too much, but what is 'distribution'. Is it any situation where you show a book to someone else, or are we talking about copying?"

"Giving away would be distributing, showing a copy would not, I'm unsure about temporary loans without a fee. That might be worth defining... Ugh, there's not a good place to include definitions, I'd put it at the end but we want 'private' to be defined before we use it to avoid alarming conservatives..."