If you’re in London on Sunday March 19, there’s a public event at my office that I’d like you to come to: we eat brunch, go to Speakers’ Corner, and give impromptu speeches about copyright in between the Marxists, god-botherers and loonies.

Since January 2005, I’ve hosted a series of EFF-sponsored monthly-ish brunches at my office in London’s Stanhope Centre. These “London Copyfighters’ Drunken Brunch and Talking Shop” events have been semi-open: anyone who showed up was welcome, but I didn’t advertise it much because I couldn’t afford to feed an army.

But Stanhope Centre’s lost its lease, I’m retired from EFF, and spring is upon us, so for the very last of these events hosted at Stanhope, I’m throwing it open to the wide world. If you’re interested in issues of copyright, patent, trademark, free information, access — that kinda thing — you’re invited to come to Stanhope on March 19th for an 11AM-1PM brunch and then to come and give a speech at Hyde Park’s legendary Speaker’s Corner, just over the road.

Giving a speech at Speakers’ Corner is wild — it’s the ultimate soap-boxing experience, and everyone who’s done it swears by it. You can check out pictures of previous declaimings, too.

Come April and through the spring and summer, the Open Rights Group will continue to run Copyfighters’ Brunches as picnics in Hyde Park, and it’s hunting for a nearby indoor home for the autumn and winter of 2006.

March’s event is co-sponsored by EFF, Open Rights Group, the Foundation for Free Information Infrastructure and the Open Knowledge Forum Network.

When: Sunday, March 19. Food from 11AM to 1PM; Speakers’ Corner excursion 1PM-~2PM.

Where: Stanhope Centre (Stanhope Centre, Stanhope House, Stanhope Place, London W2 2HH)

Directions: The nearest underground station is Marble Arch. If you are at the Marble Arch tube station, walk West on the North side of the street. The Street is Oxford Street as you exit the tube but it immediately becomes Bayswater. Keeping walking due West for 2 blocks (using the pedestrian underpass to cross under Edgeware Road). Hyde Park will be on your left or to the South as you walk. Then, take the first right after you exit the pedestrian underpass is Stanhope Place. (It is about 75 yards from where you exit the pedestrian underpass. Walk north on Stanhope Place approximately 50 feet to the first set of steps on the block. You will see a sign for Stanhope Centre. Walk up the stairs and ring the bottom bell, which is marked Stanhope Centre.

My podcast of I, Robot will be airing on a low-power FM station in Berkshire, Mass., in installments, Thursday nights at midnight. They’re using my Creative Commons license to do this — it’s great!

Wil Harris from Bit-Tech conducted an interview with me last week; it’s online there now:

I think that joining FreeCulture, joining EFF is a really important step, because understanding that there’s a political dimension to this is also crucial.

This whole thing isn’t just about wanting stuff for free, it’s about understanding that information is built either in architectures of control or architectures of liberty and that the job of the EFF etc. is to make sure that architectures of liberty dominate. The EFF wins big, substantial battles on these subjects every year.

If you’re in the UK, hold the BBC to account. Why is it shipping the IMP, a DRM crippled player? Is there a point in the future where the BBC imagines that bits are going to get harder to copy? And that the IMP will solve its problem? Really, what the BBC is saying is that there’s two ways you can get its content after it airs on the TV; one is that you can get it through the IMP and have a crippled experience, the other is that you can be a criminal. If you want to get BBC content in a way that you want to use it, in a way that the law says you can use it, you have to be a criminal first. As a UK license payer, you’ve already paid for this content.

Finally, use Creative Commons licenses in your work. Last year, there was a proposal to build a harmonised DRM specification for the European Union, and one of the things they said is that we should embark on this in a way that would eliminate unencrypted works – period. They said that all works should be encrypted in some form.

I’ve just posted the final installment of the podcasting of my story, “I, Robot” (a nominee for this year’s British Science Fiction Award and Locus Award), which was originally published in the Infinite Matrix online magazine. Next up, Return to Pleasure Island, originally published in my short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More.

Oops — the original posting had a corrupt file, but now it’s fixed. Sorry!

IBM Insights magazine has an interview with me in the current issue, and they’ve given me permission to distribute the PDF.

I’m giving a talk on copyright, creativity and authorship at a public event in London next week put on by the Open Knowledge Foundation:

Speakers:

* Paula LeDieu, iCommons
* Cory Doctorow, Writer and Campaigner
* Tom Chance, RemixReading and Free Culture UK
* Jennifer Rigby, BBC Creative Archive

* When: Wednesday 22nd February 2006, 7-9pm
* Where: Stanhope Centre, Marble Arch, London, W2 2HH. (Directions) (Map)

Well, I’ve just had my second flight cancellation from London-Boston in 24 hours, and my new flight doesn’t land until 5PM. As many of you know, I’m scheduled to be speaking at MIT’s Bartos Theater at 5PM, which means I’m going to be late. Someone’s picking me up at the airport and I’m going to sit as far forward on the plane as I can, so with any luck I won’t be too late. Luckily, we’ve got a great big block of time booked for my talk — 5PM-7PM with a subsequent reception until 9PM, so with any luck you’ll be able to entertain yourselves for a bit until I get there. Just cross your fingers and hope for short lines at the Department of Homeland Security checkpoint.