News

Video: Scalzi and me talk YA fiction

Tor and Expanded Books have released part two of the video interview/book trailer they shot with me and John Scalzi, talking about our new young adult novels -- my Little Brother and John's Zoe's Tale, which comes out in three weeks. The Expanded People really cut nice stuff -- I laughed even harder watching the video than I did when we were shooting it!

Sci-Fi Juggernauts Meet Up - Part 2

See also: Scalzi and I talk about our latest books -- video

Guardian column — Illegal filesharing: A suicide note from the music industry

The Guardian's just published my latest column, "Illegal filesharing: A suicide note from the music industry" about the insanity of the latest record-company salvo in the copyright wars, a cozy deal with British ISPs that will have them spying on and degrading the connections of subscribers accused of infringing downloading:

So no, I don't think this is going to have any appreciable effect on filesharing. However, it will succeed in driving music-swapping even further underground, to encrypted protocols and offline hard-drive parties and private swapping networks. These are every bit as efficient at getting music into the hands of kids, but they're a lot harder to monitor and charge money for.

The original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter. After all, they had the fastest-growing technology in the history of the world at their disposal, 70 million internet users in 18 months, and they'd found that the average American user was willing to spend $15 a month for the service. The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead, and out of the ashes of Napster arose dozens of new networking technologies. Each one was more hardened against monitoring and disconnection than the last.

These days, if you wanted to charge a flat fee for access to all music (something that consumers all over the world would be eager to accept), you'd have to do stuff that's a lot more complicated and funky to get anything like the clean reports we'd have gotten off of Napster 1.0.

And yet that's just what we're going to end up doing. It's historically inevitable: whenever technology makes it impossible to police a class of copyright use, we've solved the problem by creating blanket licences.

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Illegal filesharing: A suicide note from the music industry

The Guardian

Reading of The Super Man and the Bugout

Roy Trumbull has performed an excellent reading of my short story The Super Man and the Bugout -- a story about Superman as a Jewish boy raised in Toronto's suburbs, put out of work by the arrival of benevolent aliens who welcome Earth to the Galactic Federation.

MP3 Link

Interview with Free Talk Live

I recorded an interview with the libertarian podcast Free Talk Live earlier this week and they've just popped it on the air. I've never really done an interview where I ended up debating socialized medicine.

MP3 Link

25 spots open for tonight’s talk in Cambridge

As I mentioned earlier, I'm giving a free talk tonight in Cambridge, UK. The seating is limited and filled up weeks ago, but the organisers now tell me that they've had 25 last-minute dropouts -- if you wanted to go but couldn't get a reservation, here's your chance! Follow the link below to reserve your ticket!

We made a bet, some decades ago, that the information economy would be based on buying and selling (and hence restricting copying of) information. We were totally, 100 percent wrong, and now the world’s in turmoil because of it. What does a copy-native economy look like? How do everyone from barbers to musicians become richer, more fulfilled and more civilly engaged in a real information society. And what do we do about the fact that a couple of dinosauric entertainment companies are determined to screw it up?

Cory Doctorow is a blogger, science fiction writer and journalist. He is an editor of Boing Boing, the 11th best blog in the world (according to Time Magazine). He was the 2006-2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. He founded the software company Opencola which was later sold to the Open Text Corporation. He also writes regularly for The Guardian.

Cory will be speaking for one hour at 5:30pm on July 22nd 2008. UPDATE: Cory will now be speaking at Robinson College, Grange Road, Cambridge CB3 9AN.

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Copyright enforcers should learn lessons from the war on spam

The Guardian

Guardian column on parallels between the spamwars and the copyright wars

My latest Guardian column, "Copyright enforcers should learn lessons from the war on spam," looks at the fallout from the failed tactics of the spamwar and asks how the entertainment industry plans on doing any better trying the same tactics on an even grander and more savage scale:

Content-based filters

These were pretty effective for a very brief period, but the spammers quickly outmanoeuvred them. The invention of word-salads (randomly cut/pasted statistically normal text harvested from the net), alphabetical substitutions, and other tricksy techniques have trumped the idea that you can fight spam just by prohibiting certain words, phrases or media.

Unintended consequence: It's practically impossible to have an email conversation about Viagra, inheritances, medical conditions related to genitals, and a host of other subjects because of all the "helpful" filters still fighting last year's spam battle, diligently vaporising anyone who uses the forbidden words.

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BBtv: Me at the Secret Headquarters in LA

Here's a great BBtv episode we shot at The Secret Headquarters, my favorite comic shop, while I was in LA last month!

Nimby and the D-Hoppers free, CC-licensed text

Infinite Matrix editor Eileen Gunn sez, "I've put up a new issue of the Infinite Matrix -- in honor of Cory's birthday and because I have three great stories the world needs to read: a reprint of Cory's fine Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers and two excellent stories by writers from Eastern Europe: Serbian activist and writer Yasmina Tesanovic's charming Cats and Cars at and Ukrainian SF writer Yana Dubinianska's spine-tingling Barge over Black Water. "

Nimby and the D-Hoppers is one of my most widely reprinted stories, and it's one of a very small handful of stories that I hadn't yet published for free online, though it has been released as CC-licensed podcasts and a CC licensed comic. As with the other adaptations, the text is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

And yup, yesterday was my birthday! I'm 37, which means I'm now in my prime. It sure beats being a total square at 36.

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