Greg Elmensdorp was inspired by my story Printcrime (a short-short story I wrote for Nature Magazine) to created this blue-red 3D illustration. I think it’s terrific and really captures the mood of the story.

The coppers smashed my father’s printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da’s look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.

The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da’s customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals — performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of things that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of things you could print at home, if you didn’t mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.

Printcrime in 3D

(Thanks, Greg!)

Tor and Expanded Books have released part two of the video interview/book trailer they shot with me and John Scalzi, talking about our new young adult novels — my Little Brother and John’s Zoe’s Tale, which comes out in three weeks. The Expanded People really cut nice stuff — I laughed even harder watching the video than I did when we were shooting it!

Sci-Fi Juggernauts Meet Up – Part 2

See also: Scalzi and I talk about our latest books — video

The Guardian’s just published my latest column, “Illegal filesharing: A suicide note from the music industry” about the insanity of the latest record-company salvo in the copyright wars, a cozy deal with British ISPs that will have them spying on and degrading the connections of subscribers accused of infringing downloading:

So no, I don’t think this is going to have any appreciable effect on filesharing. However, it will succeed in driving music-swapping even further underground, to encrypted protocols and offline hard-drive parties and private swapping networks. These are every bit as efficient at getting music into the hands of kids, but they’re a lot harder to monitor and charge money for.

The original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter. After all, they had the fastest-growing technology in the history of the world at their disposal, 70 million internet users in 18 months, and they’d found that the average American user was willing to spend $15 a month for the service. The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead, and out of the ashes of Napster arose dozens of new networking technologies. Each one was more hardened against monitoring and disconnection than the last.

These days, if you wanted to charge a flat fee for access to all music (something that consumers all over the world would be eager to accept), you’d have to do stuff that’s a lot more complicated and funky to get anything like the clean reports we’d have gotten off of Napster 1.0.

And yet that’s just what we’re going to end up doing. It’s historically inevitable: whenever technology makes it impossible to police a class of copyright use, we’ve solved the problem by creating blanket licences.

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As I mentioned earlier, I’m giving a free talk tonight in Cambridge, UK. The seating is limited and filled up weeks ago, but the organisers now tell me that they’ve had 25 last-minute dropouts — if you wanted to go but couldn’t get a reservation, here’s your chance! Follow the link below to reserve your ticket!

We made a bet, some decades ago, that the information economy would be based on buying and selling (and hence restricting copying of) information. We were totally, 100 percent wrong, and now the world’s in turmoil because of it. What does a copy-native economy look like? How do everyone from barbers to musicians become richer, more fulfilled and more civilly engaged in a real information society. And what do we do about the fact that a couple of dinosauric entertainment companies are determined to screw it up?

Cory Doctorow is a blogger, science fiction writer and journalist. He is an editor of Boing Boing, the 11th best blog in the world (according to Time Magazine). He was the 2006-2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. He founded the software company Opencola which was later sold to the Open Text Corporation. He also writes regularly for The Guardian.

Cory will be speaking for one hour at 5:30pm on July 22nd 2008. UPDATE: Cory will now be speaking at Robinson College, Grange Road, Cambridge CB3 9AN.

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