Jonathan Worth is a talented commercial photographer (he shot me for a feature in Popular Science a few years back) who was recently asked for his shots by the National Portrait Gallery in London, and asked if he could come and take my pic for it, offering to give me the right to use the resulting print for publicity, book jackets and so on.

The National Portrait Gallery’s crazy copyright stance sparked an interesting conversation about copyright with Jonathan (who also shot some killer photos!) and in the end, he agreed to license the photos he took of me for the exhibition under a very liberal Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, one of the most liberal licenses, allowing for both commercial uses and remixes.

One of Jonathan’s pictures showed me in my office, and I went a little Flickr-crazy marking up the photo with notes explaining what everything was. I tweeted the photo, and lots of people came by to see it — several thousand, some of whom ended up offering Jonathan paying work. It was a win all around.

This got us to talking about how producers of images and other works that are well-known digitally can use that familiarity to sell physical objects (I give away my books as ebooks to sell the print books), and Jonathan decided to try an experiment, producing 111 prints of the iconic image (without the Flickr notes!). I kicked in the 111-page initial manuscript printing of my forthcoming (April 2010) young adult novel For the Win, which I had just finished a week before. I had printed ten copies of the manuscript to pass around, and I had one copy left, and so I signed every page and handed it off to Jonathan.

Jonathan is selling his prints on a sliding scale depending on which manuscript page you get with it — high numbers are cheaper — and the one-of-a-kind super-premium offering is page one accompanied by a 100cm x 140cm special edition print that include the contact-sheets from the shoot (proceeds from this go to a local school raising money for new buildings).

I think that this is just too cool for words. Jonathan’s a professional shooter who’s also an artist, and the portrait shots are fantastic enough. But he’s also experimenting with new business-models for photography that leverage, rather than fight, the Internet. I don’t receive any of the money from this — Jonathan did the work and sank in the capital, so it’s his reward to reap.

Etsy: Photographs by Jonathan Worth

Blog: Giving things away Pt II

I’m incredibly honored to have been included in the Utne Reader’s annual list of “50 Visionaries”. I’ve been a UR fan since I was a teenager, and with the list topped by such luminaries as the Dalai Lama, John Wilbanks, Brewster Kahle and Bob Stein, I’m in good company indeed.

I’ve just gotten word from the Quantum to Cosmos festival in Waterloo, Ontario — where I’m speaking later this week — that there will be live video streams of both the panel and my solo talk (the video will also be available afterwards). They’ve also just released a new block of tickets — if you got a sold-out message before, you can try again!

Cory Doctorow at Internet Librarian International 2009 from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

Here’s an interview I sat for last week at the Internet Librarian International conference in London, on the future of libraries, access and technology.

Renjie Yao translated my short-short story Printcrime (which has been translated into several languages!) into Chinese. Thanks, Renjie Yao!

Printcrime by Cory Doctorow
神奇打印机
（加拿大）科里·多克托罗 文
姚人杰 译

我八岁的时候，警察砸掉了父亲的三维打印机。我犹然记得三维打印机散发出的热气腾腾、就像保鲜膜被放在微波炉里的那种气味，以及爸爸将新鲜的打印用粘胶倒入打印机时候，脸上异常专注的表情，还有打印好的物品从三维打印机里出来时，摸上去暖烘烘、新鲜烘烤出的触感。
警察们从房门口冲进来，挥舞着警棍，其中一人手持扩音器，口述逮捕令的内容。爸爸的一位顾客刚刚光顾过他，他买的是高档药片——能力提升药、记忆增强剂、新陈代谢促进剂。如果要在药房柜台上买这些药片，得花上一大笔钱。你可以在家里用三维打印机制造这些药片，只要你不介意哪天自己的厨房里突然站满了虎背熊腰的大块头，警棍挥舞得呼呼生风，见人就打，见东西就砸，谁也拦不住他们。
警察砸掉了奶奶的行李箱，就是她从祖国带来的那个行李箱。他们还砸掉了我们家的小冰箱，窗户上的那台清洁器。当一位警察跺起穿着皮靴的大脚踩烂了鸟笼时，我饲养的翠鸟躲在鸟笼角落里，逃过了一劫。
爸爸。警察对爸爸都干了些啥啊。当一切结束后，他的模样就像是与一支橄榄球队干了一架。警察将爸爸带出门，将他扔进警车里，让新闻记者清楚地看到这一幕，同时一位发言人告诉全世界，我父亲组织的盗版侵权行动必须为至少价值2000万的盗版商品负责，我父亲——铤而走险的歹徒——在逮捕行动中还进行了反抗。
坐在客厅的废墟里，我从手机屏幕上看到了新闻报道，一边看着屏幕，一边在心里纳闷，怎么会有人看着我们家的小公寓，我们的这个破落寒酸的家宅，还竟然误以为这是一个有组织犯罪主犯的老巢。他们当然取走了打印机，像一件战利品般的在记者面前进行展示。小厨房的一角空空荡荡，看上去有点儿可怕。我站起身，整理公寓，救下那只吱吱叫的可怜翠鸟，然后将一台搅拌机放在了那个角落。这台搅拌机也是用三维打印机生成的，因此只能用上一个月，然后我就需要打印出新的轴承部件和其他的移动部件。换做以前，我可以将任何可以打印的东西拆开又重新组装起来。
到我十八岁的那年，政府准备让老爸出狱。我去监狱里探望过他三回——我十岁生日一次，老爸五十岁生日一次，还有妈妈过世的时候。距离我上一次见到他，已经过去了两年，老爸的身体情况很糟糕。监狱的一次斗殴让他的一条腿跛了，他还频繁地回头看，仿佛是患上了抽搐症。出租车将我俩送到家门前，我俩走进家，登上楼梯，这时我感到尴尬极了，极力与这具颓废、跛脚的行尸走肉保持距离。
“拉妮，”老爸让我坐下，说，“你是个聪明的女孩，我知道的。聪明伶俐。你知道你老爸能从哪儿搞到一台打印机和一些粘胶吗？”
我双手握成拳，握得紧紧的，手指甲都快戳进手掌里。我合上了眼睛。“爸爸，你刚刚坐了十年的牢。十年啊。你还要冒着坐十年牢的风险，去印出更多的搅拌机和药片，更多的笔记本电脑和名牌帽子吗？”
老爸咧嘴一笑。“拉妮，我不傻。我已经获得了教训。不值得为了帽子或笔记本电脑坐牢。我不打算印出这些废物，永远不会再干了。”他喝了杯茶，喝茶的模样犹如在喝威士忌，小口啜饮，然后是一声满意的吐气。他合拢双眼，后靠在椅子里。
“到这儿来，拉妮，让我用耳语告诉你。让我告诉你，我在坐了十年的监狱时决定的主意。到这儿来，听你愚蠢的爹地说。”
我感觉到一种内疚的悲痛，不想让老爸扫兴。明摆的事儿，老爸已经过时了。天晓得他在监狱里都经受了什么。“什么事，爸爸？”我侧过身，说道。
“拉妮，我打算印出更多的三维打印机。更多的三维打印机。每人都能有一台。值得为此坐牢。将这件事办成，什么都值得。”

Tor has updated the tile game that accompanies the ongoing serial of my forthcoming novel Makers, which comes out at the end of the month (and boy am I excited! Publishers Weekly called it “Brilliant” and a “Tour de force” and Library Journal called it “Enthusiastically recommended”).

Each installment in the serial has been accompanied by a CC-licensed image from Idiots’ Books, and the images tile, lining up with one another on all four sides. Tor is tossing these images into a Flash-toy that allows you to arrange and rotate these to your heart’s content.

The serial is up to 44 parts now, and the first 36 illos have been combined into a new, expanded, 6X6 version of the tile game (we’ll do the 7×7 soon, then the 8×8 and finish up with a 9×9 incorporating all 81!).

Makers Tile Game 6×6

Index of Makers installments

I’m speaking at a Hoxton LibDems dinner in London on Oct 19 at 7:30PM, at the Hoxton Apprentice in Hoxton Square, near Old Street Station. The event is open to the public — though they will try to get you to join/donate to the LibDems, whom I support for many reasons, not least because they’re a national party who don’t expect me to carry a biometric radio-enabled ID card as a condition of my spousal visa. Not surprisingly, I’ll be talking on “Privacy, Civil Liberties and Technology – Is Privacy Possible in the 21st Century?”

Date: Monday, October 19, 2009
Time: 7.30pm – 10.00pm

We have a top speaker for our autumn dinner this year, the science fiction writer and civil liberties campaigner; Cory Doctorow.
The theme is; “Privacy, Civil Liberties and Technology – Is Privacy Possible in the 21st Century?”. Find out more on our website where you can book in advance at the cheaper rate of £10 (£12 on the door).

The venue is just 5 minutes walk from Old Street tube in near the City in Central London.

Hackney Lib Dems autumn dinner in Hoxton Square near Old Street tube, with special guest speaker Cory Doctorow

I’ll be in Brighton, England next Saturday, Oct 17 for a Battle of Ideas event entitled “The Future of Collaboration: Sharing and Work in the Networked Age.” I’ll be on a panel with Michael Bull from the University of Sussex and Nico Macdonald, chaired by Robert Clowes of Brighton Salon. It’s at 8PM in the Jubilee Library and tickets are £7.50 (£5 concessions). Hope to see you there! (I’ll also be doing a London Battle of Ideas event on Oct 31, “Rethinking Privacy in an age of Disclosure and Sharing”)

The 21st century looks set to be age of online collaboration. While old forms of community and solidarity have waned, leaving us apparently more fragmented and individualised, the social web enables many of us to work, play and organise with others in ways previously unimaginable. Technologies like Flickr, Delicious and Wikipedia evidence new means of sharing information and working together. Many suggest these technologies will have far-reaching social implications, and even presage a new form of production and work outside the market system. While traditional free market capitalism is compromised by the worldwide recession, the world wide web is said to promise an exciting alternative. Wired’s Kevin Kelly suggests we are entering a new collectivist epoch, a ‘New Socialism’. Technology guru Howard Rheingold sees these developments as disruptive, and will change the way people ‘meet, mate, work, fight, buy, sell’. Charles Leadbeater, author of We-Think, sees the new means of networked collaboration as presaging a new production model: ‘Mass Innovation rather than Mass Production’.

The Future of Collaboration: Sharing and Work in the Networked Age

I’ll be in Waterloo, Ontario on 22 Oct 2009 for the Perimeter Institute’s Quantum to Cosmos event, which will also feature Neal Stephenson, Stewart Brand, Neil Gershenfeld, Stephen Hawking, Tara Hunt, Jaron Lanier, and many other distinguished scientists and writers. I’m doing a solo talk on copyright at 4PM and then a panel on AI and robotics for TVO’s The Agenda at 8PM.

Quantum to Cosmos

Quantum to Cosmos tickets