Media Piracy
According to the Encyclopaedia Galactica, media piracy is the leveraging of a target's branding, copyrighted material and other intellectual properties, particularly published content, to cause physical, real-world harm or severe disruption.
As media forms multiply in quantity, scale and dimension, individuals or groups (particularly employees) can use the anonymity afforded by large numbers to threaten managers, specific groups (i.e. members in another part of the company), directorates, divisions, and entire organisations, without the inherent threat of discipline, dismissal, injury, or death.
The staff of the Hitchhiker's Guide, by contrast, accept media piracy as the only logical means of defence against all the things that are wildly, crazily, stupidly cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong about our perception of all the things that happen.
Hence this particular entry.
Take, for example, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself. After a failed attempt to engineer its acquisition by force, and having seen off a competitive bid in a parallel dimension from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, InfiniDim Enterprises (Who spent millions on that name) affected a complete and extremely hostile takeover of Megadodo Publications, seizing control of the Guide and all of its assets.
The perpetrator of this heinous act was an executive by the name of Zarniwoop Vann Harl (who also happened to be a Vogon in disguise), whose first act as the new Editor-in-Chief was to immediately initiate major changes to the management of the marketing of The Guide.
InfiniDim also produced an entirely new Guide, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy Mk II, in direct assault of the values set forth by its predecessor. This bears upon its cover only one legend: PANIC.
According to Zarniwoop, there was a perfectly good and commercial reason for this:
"The Galaxy is changing. We've got to change with it. Go with the market. The market is moving up. New aspirations. New technology. There are limitless futures stretching out in every direction from this moment — and from this moment and from this. Billions of them, bifurcating every instant! Every possible position of every possible electron balloons out into billions of probabilities! Billions and billions of shining, gleaming futures!"
And, of course, billions and billions of markets.
This did not, however, require them to sell billions and billions of Guides, because of the expense. Instead, InfiniDim planned to sell just one Guide billions and billions of times by exploiting the multidimensional nature of the Universe to cut down on manufacturing costs.
And they no longer planned to sell the Guide to penniless hitch hikers. What a stupid notion that would have been! Find the one section of the market that, more or less by definition, doesn't have any money, and try and sell to it. No. They planned to sell to the Guide to the affluent business traveller and his vacationing wife in a billion, billion different futures. This was to be the most radical, dynamic and thrusting business venture in the entire multidimensional infinity of space/time/probability ever.
Until a disgruntled employee stole it, using its abilities to post an update in all previous editions of the Guide as a warning to Megadodo Publications even before their takeover took place.
He also discovered that InfiniDim Enterprises was, in fact a front for the Vogons. One Vogon in particular.
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz.
