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Cory Doctorow
Born	July 17, 1971 (1971-07-17) (age 38) Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	author, blogger
Genres	Science fiction, postcyberpunk
Notable work(s)	Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother
Notable award(s)	John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Prometheus Award, Sunburst Award
Spouse(s)	Alice Taylor
Children	Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow
Official website

Cory Doctorow (pronounced /ˈkɒri ˈdɒktəroʊ/; born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post scarcity economics.^[1]

Biography

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Trotskyist teachers,^[2] Doctorow was raised in a Jewish activist^[3] household. His father was born in a refugee camp in Azerbaijan^[4] and Doctorow became involved in the nuclear disarmament movement and as a Greenpeace campaigner as a child. He received his high school diploma from SEED School, a free school in Toronto, and dropped out of four universities without attaining a degree.

He later served on the board of directors for the Grindstone Island Co-operative on Big Rideau Lake in Ontario, helping to run a conference center devoted to peace and social justice education and activist training.

In June 1999, he co-founded the free software P2P software company Opencola with John Henson and Grad Conn. The company was sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario in the summer of 2003.^[1]

Doctorow moved to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years,^[1] helping to set up the Open Rights Group, before quitting to pursue writing full-time in January 2006. Upon his departure, Doctorow was named a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.^[1]

He was named the 2006-2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, jointly sponsored by the Royal Fulbright Commission,^[5] the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. The academic Chair included a one year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. ^[6][1]

He then returned to London. He is a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.

in 2009, Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He was formerly a student in the program in 1993-94, but left without completing a thesis.

Doctorow is married to Alice Taylor, and together they have one daughter, named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, who was born in 2008.^[7] Cory Doctorow and Alice Taylor married on Sunday, October 26, 2008.^[8]

Other work and fellowships

He served as Canadian Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1999.

Together with Austrian art group monochrom he initiated the Instant Blitz Copy Fight project, for which people from all over the world are asked to take flash pictures of copyright warnings in movie theaters.^[9]

At the 2003 Torcon 3 World Science Fiction Convention, Doctorow was a featured guest.

On October 31, 2005, Doctorow was involved in a controversy over digital rights management with Sony-BMG, as told in Wikinomics.^[10]

Cory Doctorow at the Singularity Summit at Stanford in 2006

Doctorow is a regular contributor to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio program and podcast, Search Engine.

Fiction

Doctorow (left) pictured at the 2006 Lift Conference with fellow Boing Boing contributor Jasmina Tešanović (centre) and cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling (right).

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Doctorow's first novel, was published in January 2003, and was the first novel released under one of the Creative Commons licenses, allowing readers to circulate the electronic edition as long as they neither made money from it nor used it to create derived works. The electronic edition was released simultaneously with the print edition.

In March 2003, it was re-released under a different Creative Commons license that allowed derivative works such as fan fiction, but still prohibited commercial usage. It was nominated for a Nebula Award,^[11] and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2004. A semi-sequel short story called Truncat was published on Salon.com in August 2003.

Doctorow's other novels have been released under Creative Commons licenses that allow derived works and prohibit commercial usage, and he has followed the model of making digital versions available, without charge, at the same time that print versions are published.

His Sunburst Award-winning short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More, was also published in 2004: "0wnz0red" from this collection was nominated for the 2004 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.^[12]

Doctorow released the bestselling novel Little Brother in 2008 under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. [1] It was nominated for a 2009 Hugo Award, and won the 2009 Prometheus Award,^[13] Sunburst Award,^[14] and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

His new novel is titled "Makers", and is being serialized for free on the Tor Books website. ^[15]

Nonfiction and other writings

Doctorow's nonfiction works include his first book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (co-written with Karl Schroeder and published in 2000), and his contributions to Boing Boing, the weblog he co-edits, as well as regular columns in Popular Science and Make magazines. He is a Contributing Writer to Wired magazine, and contributes occasionally to other magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Globe and Mail, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and the Boston Globe. In 2004, he wrote an essay on Wikipedia included in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, comparing Internet attempts at Hitchhiker's Guide-type resources, including a discussion of the Wikipedia article about himself.

Doctorow contributed the foreword to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky. He also was a contributing writer for the book Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century.^[16]

Some of his non-fiction published between 2001 and 2007 has been collected by Tachyon Publications as Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future.

Opinions on intellectual property

Doctorow believes that copyright laws should be liberalized to allow for free sharing of all digital media. He has also advocated filesharing^[17]. He argues that copyright holders should have a monopoly on selling their own digital media, and copyright laws should only come into play when someone attempts to sell a product currently under someone else's copyright.

Doctorow is an opponent of DRM, claiming that it limits the free sharing of digital media and frequently causes problems for legitimate users (including registration problems that lock users out of their own purchases and prevent them from being able to move their media to other devices and platforms)^[18].

In popular culture

Cory Doctorow wears a red cape, goggles and a balloon as he receives the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award, spoofing an xkcd webcomic in which he is mentioned.

The webcomic xkcd occasionally features a partially fictional version of Doctorow who lives in a hot air balloon "up in" the blogosphere and wears a red cape and goggles, such as in the comic "Blagofaire".^[19] When Doctorow won the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award, the presenters gave him a red cape, goggles and a balloon.^[20]

xkcd again featured Cory in its January 7, 2009^[21] image title text saying "Steve Jobs should be better soon -- now that the Apple Store is getting rid of DRM, Cory Doctorow will get rid of his Steve Jobs voodoo doll."

Awards

• 2000 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer^[22]
• 2004 Locus Award for Best First Novel for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
• 2004 Sunburst Award for A Place So Foreign and Eight More
• 2007 The Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award^[23]
• for Little Brother:
  • 2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award ^[24]
  • 2009 Prometheus Award^[25]
  • 2009 Sunburst Award.^[26]

Bibliography

Science fiction novels

• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Tor Books, 2003) under a Creative Commons License
• Eastern Standard Tribe (Tor Books, 2004) under a Creative Commons License
• Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (Tor Books, 2005) and under a Creative Commons License
• Little Brother (Tor Books, 2008) and under a Creative Commons License
• Makers (Tor Books, 2009) and under a Creative Commons License

Short stories and anthologies

• "Truncat" (short story) -- a quasi-sequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
• 0wnz0red, short story
• A Place So Foreign and Eight More (short story collection, Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003)
• "i, robot" (Hugo nominated short story, InfiniteMatrix.net, 2005)
• Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (short story collection, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007) ISBN 1560259817

Other

• Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books. (online text) (February 12, 2004)
• Glenn Yeffeth, ed., The Anthology at the End of the Universe?, chapter titled "Wikipedia: A Genuine H2G2-Minus the Editors", by Cory Doctorow, Benbella Books ISBN 1-932100-56-3
• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (self-help, Alpha Books, 2000)
• Essential Blogging (tech help, O'Reilly and Associates, 2002). ISBN 0-596-00388-9
• /usr/bin/god (novel; Tor Books) — In a June 11, 2008 interview with the Onion's A.V. Club, Doctorow stated that the book was "on the shelf more or less permanently, although it might be resurrected at some point.^[27]
• Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (September, 2008)
• There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow / Now is the Best Time of Your Life (Novella, forthcoming)

References

External links

• Cory Doctorow's personal website
• Boing Boing blog
• Cory Doctorow's USC Course
• Cory Doctorow at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• When Cory Doctorow Ruled the World (February 2007 interview, with link to audio)
• Video of keynote speech at LIFT06 conference
• Video of Cory Doctor's lecture, "Copyright versus Universal Access to All Human Knowledge and Groups Without Cost: the state of play in the global copyfight" at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival

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From Wikiquote

Cory Doctorow (born July 17, 1971) is a blogger, journalist and science fiction author in favor of liberalizing copyright laws.

Sourced

• I'm not a lawyer— I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.
  • Microsoft Research DRM talk(17 June 2004)

• It is a mistake to let aesthetics drive your rational decision making.
  • Pwned: How copyright turns us all into IP serfs (February 22, 2007, UNC iBiblio)

• There's something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. It's unsurprising that when you ask your brain to model some other person, it rises to the task. But that's exactly what happens to a reader when you hand your book over to him: he simulates your characters in his head, trying to interpret that character's actions through his own lens.
  • In Praise of Fanfic. Locus (May 2007). Retrieved on 2007-05-21.

• I'm of the opinion that science fiction writers suck at predicting the future. We mostly go around describing the present in futuristic clothes - (such as) Mary Shelley, Bill Gibson, and many others.
  • Where is my flying car?. 3rd Degree (Sept 2007). Retrieved on 2008-05-15.

• Any time someone puts a lock on something you own against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit.
  • Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks. O'Reilly (Feb 9-11 2009). Retrieved on 2009-05-06.

Unsourced

• "Trying to learn about the future from science fiction is like trying to learn about love from romance novels."

Little Brother

• Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.

• Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time rich and cash poor.

• This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

• First-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don’t have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word-of-mouth.
  • "A note about this book, January 9, 2003

• P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books, music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about everything online. What’s more, they’ve done it far cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever.
  Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it’s hard to figure out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It’s your basic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade.
  • "A note about this book, January 9, 2003

• I released this book a little over a year ago under the terms of a Creative Commons license that allowed my readers to freely redistribute the text without needing any further permission from me. In this fashion, I enlisted my readers in the service of a grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way into cultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very satisfactorily.
  When I originally licensed the book under the terms set out in the next section, I did so in the most conservative fashion possible, using CC's most restrictive license. I wanted to dip my toe in before taking a plunge. I wanted to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their peers that maximal copyright is the only thing that stands between us and penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I had the intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved" regime would serve me well, I still couldn't shake the atavistic fear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed.
  It wasn't foolish.
  • "A note about this book, February 12, 2004"

• I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.
  • First lines

• The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores from backup—in the era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly. Some people get refreshed a couple dozen times a year.

• The Bitchun Society had all but done away with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what remained—tending bar, mopping toilets—commanded Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure in your off-hours.

• I’d talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us, of the certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, of the unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. He’d tell me that deadheading was a strong indicator that one’s personal reservoir of introspection and creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no real victory.
  This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times without resolving. I’d get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.

• I think that if I’m still here in ten thousand years, I’m going to be crazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat. You really think you’re going to be anything recognizably human in a hundred centuries?

• I swore I'd be done, and that would be the end of it. And now I am. There isn't a single place left on-world that isn't part of the Bitchun Society. There isn't a single thing left that I want any part of.

• Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan, I pondered the possibility that I was nuts. It wasn’t unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and even though there were cures, they weren’t pleasant.

• I’d seen how Imagineering worked when they were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups—I knew that the real bottleneck was the constant review and revisions, the ever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissioned their work.
  Suneep looked sheepish. “Well, if all I have to do is satisfy myself that my plans are good and my buildings won’t fall down, I can make it happen very fast. Of course, my plans aren’t perfect. Sometimes, I’ll be halfway through a project when someone suggests a new flourish or approach that makes the whole thing immeasurably better.

• The universe gets older. So do I. So does my backup, sitting in redundant distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that space or age or stupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write out my life longhand, a letter to the me that I’ll be when it’s restored into a clone somewhere, somewhen. It’s important that whoever I am then knows about this year, and it’s going to take a lot of tries for me to get it right.

Eastern Standard Tribe

• Engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

• Larry poured himself a coffee. "I hate when they come in here with computers. They sit forever at their tables, and they don't talk to nobody, it's like having a place full of statues or zombies."

• "Christ, you're dragging me out for that? I can tell you what they'll say. They'll drag out the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: kiddie porn, terrorists, pirates, and the mafia. They'll tell us that any tool for communicating that they can't tap, log, and switch off is irresponsible. They'll tell us we're stealing from ISPs. It's what they say every time someone tries this: Philly, New York, London. All around the world same song."

• All secrets are deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature of secrets.

• No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.

• It's not necessarily about what career you pick. It's about how you do what you do.

External links

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Cory Doctorow