My latest Guardian column, “Free data sharing is here to stay,” is live — it’s an argument about the “information economy,” and whether restricting copying hurts or helps it.

It used to be that copy-prevention companies’ strategies went like this:

“We’ll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an
unauthorised copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the
cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy.”

But every time a PC is connected to the internet and its owner is taught to use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option appears: you can just download a copy from the internet. Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to access any data, without having to break the anti-copying technology, just by searching for the cracked copy on the public internet. If there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that an information economy will increase the technological literacy of its participants.

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IDW comics have produced a six-issue series of comics based on my short stories (they’ve adapted Anda’s Game, After the Siege, Craphound, I, Robot, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, and Nimby and the D-Hoppers). I had approval on all the scripts, interiors and covers — and I’m really happy with the caliber of work IDW got for me. The series launches this month with Anda’s Game, and IDW will sell you a subscription to the whole run for $23.99. Once the series concludes, IDW will publish a trade paperback collection, and we’ll be doing a Creative Commons release of the whole work to coincide with the trade.

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See also:
IDW will do six comics based on my stories
Sam Kieth cover for comic of Cory’s Anda’s Game
Model contract clause for works in Creative Commons

Radar commissioned me to write them a science fiction story about “the day Google became evil.” I wrote them a little short-short called “Scroogled,” about the perfect axis of evil: the DHS and Google, working hand in hand. As part of the contract negotiation, I got Radar to agree to release the story under a remix-friendly Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, so you’re free to make movies, slideshows, songs, art, or new texts from this one.

Greg landed at San Francisco International Airport at 8 p.m., but by the time he’d made it to the front of the customs line, it was after midnight. He’d emerged from first class, brown as a nut, unshaven, and loose-limbed after a month on the beach in Cabo (scuba diving three days a week, seducing French college girls the rest of the time). When he’d left the city a month before, he’d been a stoop-shouldered, potbellied wreck. Now he was a bronze god, drawing admiring glances from the stews at the front of the cabin.

Four hours later in the customs line, he’d slid from god back to man. His slight buzz had worn off, sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and his shoulders and neck were so tense his upper back felt like a tennis racket. The batteries on his iPod had long since died, leaving him with nothing to do except eavesdrop on the middle-age couple ahead of him.

“The marvels of modern technology,” said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: Immigration—Powered by Google.

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I gave a talk in Beijing this week at the Beijing Bookworm, an excellent bookstore/cafe. Filmmaker Victor Muh recorded the whole thing and put it up on YouTube!

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(Thanks, Jeremy!)

A couple weeks ago, I was on a great panel on copyright at the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan, called “Defending the Public Domain from Corporate Copyright Maximalism.” Steve Stair videoed my introductory remarks and posted them to YouTube.

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