The launch for the UK edition of my novel Little Brother has been scheduled! I’ll be signing at Forbidden Planet in London on Satuday, November 29. They’re also taking pre-orders for signed copies by mail-order — makes a dandy Christmas pressie!
Cory Doctorow – Little Brother
Saturday 29, November, 1:00PM – 2:00PM
Forbidden Planet London Megastore,
179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8JROur Price: £6.99
The launch for the UK edition of my novel Little Brother has been scheduled! I’ll be signing at Forbidden Planet in London on Satuday, November 29. They’re also taking pre-orders for signed copies by mail-order — makes a dandy Christmas pressie!
Cory Doctorow – Little Brother
Saturday 29, November, 1:00PM – 2:00PM
Forbidden Planet London Megastore,
179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8JROur Price: £6.99
Smári McCarthy, a high-school teacher in Iceland, has been teaching a course unit on civil liberties and technological literacy based around my novel Little Brother. He’s launched a new Google Group for the kids in his class (and other classes around the world) to continue the discussion — what an awesome idea!
At the end of the last class yesterday the idea came up to form a
mailing list for young people who’re interested in digital freedoms,
computer security and so on, and one of the students suggested that we
call the list “Watching Back”. The list is watchingback@googlegroups.com
and almost all the kids who took the course are on it.It would be great if people running similar courses could get their
students involved on the list, and that teachers and other people who
know something about the subject hang around and help guide the
discussion as mentors.There’s a lot to discuss. A running theme through the course was the
importance of the power of young people to influence the world. I read
from the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace in the last class,
because it is somewhat prophetic of what is going on:“You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a
world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you
entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are
too cowardly to confront yourselves.”Throughout the network young people are being empowered to change the
world, they’re figuring out the beauty of the hacker culture and the
fight for freedom. In a world where big brother is watching with
increasing scrutiny it is a big relief to know that at least the
children are watching back.
Smári McCarthy, a high-school teacher in Iceland, has been teaching a course unit on civil liberties and technological literacy based around my novel Little Brother. He’s launched a new Google Group for the kids in his class (and other classes around the world) to continue the discussion — what an awesome idea!
At the end of the last class yesterday the idea came up to form a
mailing list for young people who’re interested in digital freedoms,
computer security and so on, and one of the students suggested that we
call the list “Watching Back”. The list is watchingback@googlegroups.com
and almost all the kids who took the course are on it.It would be great if people running similar courses could get their
students involved on the list, and that teachers and other people who
know something about the subject hang around and help guide the
discussion as mentors.There’s a lot to discuss. A running theme through the course was the
importance of the power of young people to influence the world. I read
from the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace in the last class,
because it is somewhat prophetic of what is going on:“You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a
world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you
entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are
too cowardly to confront yourselves.”Throughout the network young people are being empowered to change the
world, they’re figuring out the beauty of the hacker culture and the
fight for freedom. In a world where big brother is watching with
increasing scrutiny it is a big relief to know that at least the
children are watching back.
My latest Locus column, “Why I Copyfight,” was published a couple weeks back while I was on honeymoon and made quite a stir. It’s intended as a concise answer to the question, “Why should we care about the copyright wars, anyway?”
The Internet is a system for efficiently making copies between computers. Whereas a conversation in your kitchen involves mere perturbations of air by noise, the same conversation on the net involves making thousands of copies. Every time you press a key, the keypress is copied several times on your computer, then copied into your modem, then copied onto a series of routers, thence (often) to a server, which may make hundreds of copies both ephemeral and long-term, and then to the other party(ies) to the conversation, where dozens more copies might be made.
Copyright law valorizes copying as a rare and noteworthy event. On the Internet, copying is automatic, massive, instantaneous, free, and constant. Clip a Dilbert cartoon and stick it on your office door and you’re not violating copyright. Take a picture of your office door and put it on your homepage so that the same co-workers can see it, and you’ve violated copyright law, and since copyright law treats copying as such a rarified activity, it assesses penalties that run to the hundreds of thousands of dollars for each act of infringement.
There’s a word for all the stuff we do with creative works — all the conversing, retelling, singing, acting out, drawing, and thinking: we call it culture.
Culture’s old. It’s older than copyright.
