News

Interview on Lab Out Loud science teacher podcast

Lab out Loud, a podcast for science teachers, interviewed me -- they're fun guys!

MP3 Link

Leipzig day two

I'm pretty sure I just had a second day in Leipzig, but it's a kind of blur. Some thoughts to record however:

* Cosplayers, cosplayers, cosplayers. Mr Jenkins to the white courtesy phone please, your meme is ready

* The Viennese coffee stand: I had to actually stop myself from going back because I'd drunk so goddamned much amazing coffee

* US consular folks: pretty nice

* Rohwolt's CFO: pretty reasonable on the subject of free downloads!

* German press: Extremely sweet

* German sound guys: Tell you what: when I'm doing a reading and I get WAY close to the mic and speak WAY loud during a dramatic moment, I'm doing it for a REASON. It is not a call for you to turn the gain on my mic down so low I have to swallow it from then on in order to get any amplification. Work with me here.

* Leipzig airport only sells broadband in two increments: 1 hour and 30 days. Can you say screwjob? Danke T-Mobile, und get screwed.

Leipzig book-fair day one

It's 1206AM in Germany and I'm ready to drop -- left the flat in London at 0445 this morning to get to the Leipzig Book Fair and have had a high old time in my first of two days onsite.

Leipzig: pretty, in that particularly German way of mid-sized cities that have great swathes of cobbeldy wobbeldy old charming pedestrian streets that are nevertheless spotless and incredibly efficiently managed and fitted out. Too many of the same bloody high-street shops (the world doesn't need more H&Ms), but a trip into a vast Conrad electronics shop to buy a plug adapter reminded me of the incredible and resilient German passion for making and fixing stuff. Something just wonderful about confronting whole walls full of locally made tools and parts for fixing the things in your house.

The fair: Young! Very young! Full of kids in cosplayer regalia, like some kind of existence proof of a Henry Jenkins essay! (Kids in manga outfits get in free). Discovered a motherlode of cosplayers in a "Japanese Tea Room" in hall 2, in the midst of a football-field-sized kawaii of anime booths ("kawaii" being the collective noun for anime booths, I am reliably assured).

So cool to see kids just totally in love with books and running around surrounded by them all day.

Lots of international pavilions. The former Yugo states have free booze at their pavilions and are swarmed. The US has Obama cardboard dollies and free pamphlets of Twain's "The Awful German Language" in German and English. Canada didn't show up at all.

There seems to be no WiFi, free or paid in the hall. FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL. Hey bookfair, a hint: when foreigners travel to your event, their phones' data-plans don't work. Which means that people here to do business need WiFi to stay in touch. Way to make publishing seem far behind the times. It's 20-goddamned-10. You are a huge, bustling international event. Every last centimetre of your hall should be bathed in so much broadband that you get a sunburn if you stand still for too long. Christ.

The event: The Rohwolters have been lovely, and have shown me a good time. They took me and Michael -- the translator for the .de Little Brother -- down to a university hall where the public, critics, the press and 40-some schoolkids from a reading group met us. Michael read some of chapter three of LB, I read my traditional Delores Park concert scene. The Q&A afterwards was marvellous -- the kids were sharp as tacks. Reminded me of the Berkeley High kids from the LB tour, hands-down the sharpest kids I met on that trip.

Dinner was lovely -- delicious, with great conversations with my German audiobook publisher, who have incredible plans afoot for the LB audiobook.

Photos

Guardian column: is the record industry stupid or arrogant?

In my latest Guardian column, "Is the music industry trying to write the digital economy bill?", I look at the last two weeks' events in the life of the UK Digital Economy Bill, a piece of legislation tailor-made for the record industry at the expense of the public interest, freedom and due process. The question I can't answer is, does the record industry put on these vastly over-reaching shows of power because they don't care about backlash, or are they just so arrogant that they don't imagine that there will be a backlash?

[T]he next day, Bridget Fox, a LibDem prospective parliamentary candidate who had spoken out against her party's new pro-censorship stance, introduced an emergency motion to the LibDems' spring conference. This motion called for the LibDems to follow a policy that puts internet freedom front and centre, categorically rejecting web censorship and disconnection of infringers and their families, and embracing net neutrality and all the other freedoms that you'd expect from the "party of liberty". In other words, the LibDems had declared themselves to be not biddable by the entertainment industry, and indirectly but firmly rebuked the Lords who'd done the BPI's dirty work for them.

By all accounts, the "debate" following Fox's proposal was a one-sided affair. No one came forward to oppose it. Instead, for half an hour, speaker after speaker stood up to declare the importance of a free and open net. When the vote came, it was near-unanimous (I hear that there was one vote against the proposal). If the BPI had hoped to have an ally for the years to come in the LibDems, they blew it by asking for too much – and getting it. Their greed in exploiting their influence over the LibDem Lords galvanised the LibDem rank and file into enshrining a rejection of the BPI's agenda into the party's official policy.

Is the music industry trying to write the digital economy bill?

Downloadable 3D cover for MAKERS is now also an article of commerce

The folks at Shapeways surprised me in January with a 3D-printed version of the UK cover for my novel Makers, which had been designed by Shapeways community member Dmitry Kobzar. Mr Kobzar was good enough to release his 3D files under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial license.

Now Shapeways is selling 3D prints of the cover for your delectation in a variety of materials (just in case you don't have a 3D printer of your own with which to run off a copy!). For the record, I don't get any of the proceeds from it -- I just think it's way cool.

Cory Doctorow Makers cover 3D print

Clockwork Fagin 5 – CONCLUSION

Here's the fifth and final installment of "Clockwork Fagin," a young adult steampunk story commissioned for a Candlewick Press anthology edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant. The story runs to 12,500 words and should take about a month to read for the podcast.

Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com

John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.

MP3 Link

Whole story:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Free copies of FOR THE WIN for young reviewers

Tor Books, the US/Canada publisher, has two hundred advance copies of my next young adult novel, For the Win, available for free to young (19 or younger) gamers who are interested in reviewing the book on their blog or school paper. The book is about gamer kids all over the world who use multiplayer games to organize and fight back against abusive employers:

In the virtual future, you must organize to survive

At any hour of the day or night, millions of people around the globe are engrossed in multiplayer online games, questing and battling to win virtual “gold,” jewels, and precious artifacts. Meanwhile, others seek to exploit this vast shadow economy, running electronic sweatshops in the world’s poorest countries, where countless “gold farmers,” bound to their work by abusive contracts and physical threats, harvest virtual treasure for their employers to sell to First World gamers who are willing to spend real money to skip straight to higher-level gameplay.

Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of “General Robotwalla.” In Shenzen, heart of China’s industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.

The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power—including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister’s people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once—a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.

Imbued with the same lively, subversive spirit and thrilling storytelling that made LITTLE BROTHER an international sensation, FOR THE WIN is a prophetic and inspiring call-to-arms for a new generation

If you're under 19 and want a free early look at the book for review on your blog/paper/whatever, send a note with your address to torpublicity@tor.com with "FTW" for the subject-line. Also include the name of your blog or school paper. For fun, also share a game you enjoyed recently and why.

We did this with Little Brother a couple years back, on the grounds that books for young people should be available for young reviewers to write about, rather than just adult reviewers who try to figure out whether young people will enjoy them. It was a real success and I'm happy to be repeating it.

This is being launched in honor of the American Library Association's Teen Tech Week, and is open to Canadians and Americans. I'm working on a similar offer for the UK edition, for Britons, Aussies, South Africans and Kiwis, and will post about it as soon as I have details.

Guardian column on LibDem proposal to block web-lockers

For my Guardian column today, I took the LibDem Lords to task for introducing legislation that would ban web-lockers because these services allow for copyright infringement. I won't argue that copyright infringement takes place on services like Google Docs and YouSendIt, but the reason that these services are great for piracy is that they're great for privacy: the same feature that lets me use YouSendIt to send a family member a private video of my kid in the bath is the feature that lets a copyright violator to share a pirated movie. And you can't get rid of the copyright violations without eliminating our ability to privately share large files for legitimate reasons.

And separate from that, there's the infrastructural cost of establishing a Great Firewall of Britain in order to block access to web lockers. Developing a system whereby parts of the net can be shut off for all of Britain creates the possibility that someone will use the system to shut off the wrong part of the net. I'm not just talking about the danger of a hijacker breaking into the system to shut down or redirect traffic to legitimate sites (say, Microsoft Security Centre or the BBC), but the attractive nuisance presented by such a system. Once you create the facility to shut off parts of the internet that are implicated in civil disputes, how long will it be before people who've alleged a libel or are worried about a trade secret being not so secret are lobbying to have this turned to their aid?

Which isn't to say that this will actually stop infringement. File sharers have already demonstrated their ability to use the perfectly legal, widespread proxy services abroad to circumvent network blocks - ask any 14-year-old whose school network is censored by blocking software and I guarantee you'll get an education in how to evade this kind of thing. Which is great news if you're a pirate, but why should sound engineers, doting grandparents, and solicitors have to learn how to evade the Great Firewall in order to conduct their legitimate business?

My Lords, you can't please the entertainment industry and sustain privacy

(Image: Lockers 3, a Creative Commons Attribution file from dizfunkshinal's photostream)

Column: HOWTO make smarter dumb mistakes about the future

My latest Locus magazine column, "Making Smarter Dumb Mistakes About the Future," is about the ways that corporate futurism goes astray, imagining futures that make the boss happy which never come to pass. It's based on the magnificent and wondrously wrong "Carousel of Progress" that Walt Disney creates for GE's pavilion at the 1964 NYC World's Fair, an updated version of which lives at Walt Disney World. I love that thing to bits. I wish it would fit on my desk, I'd put it there like the old poets used to keep a skull by their elbows, to remind them of their hubris and frailty.

Also, if I had one on my desk, I could stop dragging my family onto it. My wife has written a new chorous to the themesong (which goes, "There's a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day"): "There's a great big hairy Cory Doctorow, sitting in the front row every day."

When confronted with a new technology and asked to predict its application, it's tempting to look for existing, unsolved problems to which the technology might apply. For example, in a notorious early ad for personal computing, Honeywell depicted a satisfied, modish hausfrau cheerfully setting the dip-switches on her kitchen's PC in order to recall recipes. It's easy to follow their thinking: Computers are used by giant companies to store and manipulate files in the workplace. What files do housewives have to store and manipulate? Recipes! This is the "horseless carriage" fallacy: tomorrow's world will be like today, but moreso. Faster transport will get us to the same places, but faster. Faster communications will let us talk to the same people, but better.

So it's natural to think that HD television will be twice as unifying as old, standard-def sets (in fact, one of the big selling points for HD is that it will allow a small percentage of the household, usually Dad, to watch sports matches with his friends, while the rest of the family waits it out somewhere else).

Making Smarter Dumb Mistakes About the Future

Printcrime video

Josh Swinehart made this cute procedural movie using my story Printcrime as a script. Cool!

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