Amsterdam’s excellent American Book Center is now carrying my DIY science fiction short story collection, With a Little Help, in its inventory; they’ve got a print-on-demand machine that’ll print and bind a copy in any of the four covers (they’ll also ship within Europe and abroad).

Back in July, I went to Mexico City to moderate a panel at the Campus Party conference, a massive LAN party/campout/hackathon/tech policy event. It was a long, long way to go, but it was worth it: my panelists were Tim Berners-Lee (who invented the Web), Vint Cerf (one of the most important figures in the invention of the Internet) and Al Gore (who, despite sneering misquotations, *was* very, very important to the formation of the Internet as we know it today).

We had a wide-ranging discussion, but kept circling back to the threats and promises for the net — copyright wars, privacy wars, government and grassroots. It was a lot of fun, and quite an honor, and I’m happy to see they’ve got the video online.

Al Gore, Vint Cerf y Tim Berners-Lee en Campus Party México 2011 – Panorama actual del Internet

(Thanks, Jan!)

This week, I gave the keynote address at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, BC. The event’s organizers were kind enough to record and release my video to their YouTube channel. My talk was about the way that copyright can be made to work for creators in the digital age, and why it’s important for everyone that we don’t get it wrong.

SIGGRAPH 2011 : Cory Doctorow’s Keynote Address

My latest Guardian column, “Android and iOS both fail, but Android fails better,” explains why I prefer Android to iOS — not because I trust Google more than I trust Apple, but because Android requires less trust than iOS.

I use Android because I don’t trust Google. Sure, I trust and like individual googlers, and admire many of the things the company has managed – but I don’t for one moment think that Google’s management is making its decisions in order to make me happy, fulfilled and free.

I think there are good days when Google’s management might believe that helping me attain those ends will make it more money, but if it were to believe that making me miserable would enrich its shareholders without alienating too many of its key personnel and partners, my happiness would cease to matter in the slightest.

So why use Android? Because it requires less trust in Google than using iOS requires that you trust Apple. iOS has one official store, and it’s illegal in most places to buy and install apps except through this store. If you and Apple differ about which apps you need, you have to break the law to get your iPhone or iPad to run the app that Apple rejected.

Android and iOS both fail, but Android fails better

(Image: Rooting my HTC Hero Android Phone, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from a_mason’s photostream)

The nice folks at Colbyjack have begun a free, Creative-Commons licensed fan podcast serial of my novel For the Win. The first of 37 installments is here (here’s the MP3), and the RSS feed for the podcast is here. (And don’t forget, you can get a DRM-free MP3 of the official, Random House audiobook, expertly read by the excellent George Newbern, direct from me, or from your favorite audiobook retailer)

I’m headed to Vancouver this weekend to give a keynote at SIGGRAPH; I did a long interview with Blaine Kyllo from the Georgia Straight about the subject of my talk — that is, how you build a digital copyright system that gives creators a fair deal, and why getting it wrong is bad for the whole society, not just artists.

BK: That’s always been the refrain, hasn’t it? That the markets are going to take care of things. But they tend to be governed and controlled by those with money, which are the corporations which have a vested interest in maintaining status quo, right?

CD: And also that they are…markets, especially markets where the market is built around something that is a regulatory fiat.

This isn’t like a market in potatoes where the potato exists whether or not the government creates a potato right. This is a market in goods that have no tangible existence. This isn’t the market for books; this is the market for the words on the books. And that market only exists to the extent that the government comes in and says, “This part of the word is property and this part of the word isn’t owned by anyone.”

So for example, you can register a copyright in the tune of a song, but not in the rhythm of a song. Now if copyrights had been developed in the Afro-Caribbean tradition, where the tunes tend to be improvised and the complex polyrhythms tend to be static and are thought of as the works of authorship, we would have a totally different view of what was a song and what was incidental to the song, what was just the stuff that musicians did while they were performing the song. Right now we think of the words and the music as being the song, we don’t think of the drumming as being the song.

So we’re not just talking about a market. Even if you’re an “A is A”, Ayn Rand fundamentalist, we’re not talking about markets in the way that we think about markets, as a market for cars or real estate or something, we’re talking about a market in a good whose contours are defined by a bunch of regulators who sit down in a board room with some industrialists who say, “We would make more money if you would make this part of this ephemeral, imaginary thing into a property right.” And they listen to all the different people who have opinions on which part of your imagination should be property, and they go, “Well, this part makes sense to be property,” and then they go off and trade it.

Actually, I don’t think that that’s totally bent or crazy, I just think that it’s rife with potential for abuse, and that we should look at the arguments of people who are present-day beneficiaries of that system, who say that what we need is more of it, and what we need is more of it not because we would no longer have any works if we didn’t have more of this kind of right that we benefit from, but they’d be the wrong kind of works.

So for example when you say to a movie executive, “What do you mean that we’ve got to shut down YouTube to keep the Hollywood film industry alive?” Hollywood gives us, like, 40, 100 hours of movies a year? We get 49 hours of video every minute on YouTube. And they go, “Well, that’s not good video. It’s the wrong kind of video.”

I think that when you have an industrialist who says, “This policy that is supposed to create video is creating the wrong kind of video, it should create my video, of which there would be a lot less of it, but I’d make more money from it.” I think that we should at least look that argument up and down pretty thoroughly before we go, “Oh, yeah, makes sense.”