Copyrights vs Human Rights: big publishing and SOPA

/ / News

My latest Publishers Weekly column is “Copyrights vs. Human Rights.” In honor of Human Rights Day on Dec 10, I’ve written a piece on publishing’s shameful support of SOPA, a law that will punish the online services that are so key to coordinating and publicizing human rights struggles around the world.

The U.N. characterizes access to the Internet as a human right, and government research in the U.K. and in the U.S. shows the enormous humanitarian benefits of network access for poor and vulnerable families: better nutrition, education, and jobs; more social mobility and opportunity; and civic and political engagement. Yet the services that provide the bulk of these benefits—search engines, Web hosts, and online service providers like Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter, Wikipedia, and YouTube—could never satisfy the requirements set out in SOPA. The only way for these platforms to satisfy SOPA would be to all but shut off the public’s ability to contribute and to throttle free expression for all but those entities that can afford to pay a lawyer to certify that their uploaded material will not attract a copyright complaint.

Another group of important entities that could never satisfy SOPA are the civic-minded hackers and security researchers scrambling to improve the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). In 2011, the DNS was attacked several times, including a breach attributed to the Iranian secret police, which used forged certificates to allow them to impersonate governments, banks, and online e-mail providers like Gmail and Hotmail. If passed, SOPA would ban the production or dissemination of tools that could subvert its blocks, and that would include tools the world’s technologists are creating specifically to help defeat government censorship and surveillance. Many of these efforts and tools are actually funded by the U.S. government, and some, like the Onion Router (TOR), are used by U.S. armed forces intelligence services as well as struggling Arab Spring revolutionaries.

Cory Doctorow: Copyrights vs. Human Rights

Coming to Zurich next week

/ / News

I’m coming to Zurich next week to do a series of high-school lectures in connection with the German edition of Little Brother, and while I’m in town, I’ve scheduled a free lecture, organised by local free culture and Creative Commons activists. It’s at 8PM on December 6, at the Kunstraum Walcheturm. Hope to see you there!

Another Place, Another Time

/ / News, Podcast

Here’s a reading of my story “Another Place, Another Time,” which was my contribution to The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, a companion volume to Chris Van Allsburg’s classic Mysteries of Harris Burdick, a collection of illustrations and titles from a lost (imaginary) short story collection. I was commissioned to produce a story for the collection along with Sherman Alexie, M.T. Anderson, Kate DiCamillo, Jules Feiffer, Stephen King, Tabitha King, Lois Lowry, Gregory Maguire, Walter Dean Myers, Linda Sue Park, Louis Sachar, Jon Scieszka, Lemony Snicket, and Chris Van Allsburg.


Gilbert hated time. What a tyrant it was! The hours that crawled by when his father was at sea, the seconds that whipped past when he was playing a brilliant game in the garden with the Limburgher children. The eternity it took for summer to arrive at the beach at the bottom of the cliffs, the flashing instant before the winter stole over them again and father took to the sea once more.

“You can’t hate *time*,” Emmy said. The oldest of the three Limburghers, and the only girl, she was used to talking younger boys out of their foolishness. “It’s just *time*.”

Gilbert stopped pacing the treehouse floor and pointed a finger at her. “That’s where you’re wrong!” He thumped the book he’d taken out of his father’s bookcase, a book fetched home from London, heavy and well-made and swollen with the damp air of the sea-crossing home to America. He hadn’t read the book, but his tutor, sour Senor Uriarte, had explained it to him the day before while he was penned up inside watching the summer moments whiz past the study’s windows. “Time isn’t just time! Time is space! It’s just a dimension.” He thumped the book again for emphasis, then opened it to the page he’d marked with a wide blade of sawgrass he’d uprooted before, and chewed while Senor Uriarte explained time and space to him.

“See this? This is a point. That’s one dimension. It doesn’t have length or depth. It’s just a dot. When you add another dimension, you get *lines*.” He pointed at the next diagram with a chewed and dirty fingernail. “You can go back and you can go forward, you can move around on the surface, as though the world was a page. But you can’t go up and down, not until you add another dimension.” He pointed to the diagram of the cube, stabbing at it so hard his finger dented the page. “That’s three dimensions, up and down, side to side and in and out.”

Emmy rolled her eyes with the eloquence of a 13 year old girl whose tutor had already explained all this to her. Gilbert smiled. Em would always be a year older than him, but that didn’t mean he would always be dumber than her.

“And Mr Einstein, who is the smartest man in the whole history of the world, he has proved — absolutely *proved* — that time is just *another dimension*, just like space. Time is what happens when you can go up and down, side to side, in and out, and *before and after*.”

Em opened her mouth and closed it. Her twin brothers, Erwin and Neils, snickered at the sight of their sister struck dumb. She glared at them, then at Gilbert. “That’s stupid,” she said.

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.

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