Content
By Cory Doctorow
Content Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future. And so it has been for the last 13 years. The companies that claim the ability to regulate humanity’s Right to Know have been tireless in their endeavours to prevent the inevitable. They won most of the legislative battles in the U.S. and abroad, having purchased all the government money they could buy. They even won most of the contests in court.
They created digital rights management software schemes that behaved rather like computer viruses. Indeed, they did about everything they could short of thoughtfully examining the actual economics of the situation – it has never been proven to me that illegal downloads are more like shoplifted goods than viral marketing – or trying to come up with a business model that the market might embrace. Had it been left to the stewardship of the usual suspects, there would scarcely be a word or a note online that you didn’t have to pay to experience. There would be increasingly little free speech or any consequence since free speech is not something anyone can…
Genre: Post-1930
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Cory Doctorow
Cory Efram Doctorow was born in Toronto, Ontario, on 17 July 1971.
Biography
He is of Eastern European Jewish descent. His paternal grandfather was born in what is now Poland, and his paternal grandmother was from Leningrad. Both fled Nazi Germany’s advance eastward during World War II, and as a result, Doctorow’s father was born in a displaced persons camp near Baku, Azerbaijan. His grandparents and father emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union. Doctorow’s mother’s family were Ukrainian-Russian Romanians.
Doctorow was a friend of Columbia law professor Tim Wu, and they had been dating since their time together in elementary school. Doctorow went to summer camp as a young teenager at what he has described as a “hippy summer camp” at Grindstone Island, near Portland, Ontario, that influenced his intellectual life and development. He quit high school, received his Ontario Academic Credit (high school diploma) from the SEED School in Toronto, and attended four universities without obtaining a degree. Cory Doctorow has stated that he is unrelated to the American novelist E. L. Doctorow and maybe a third cousin once he is removed from the novelist.
Thomas Rankin in Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works (2007) describes Doctorow as “a distant cousin of author E.L. Doctorow”. In June 1999, Doctorow co-founded the free software P2P company Opencola with John Henson and Grad Conn, which sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario, in the summer of 2003. The company used a drink called OpenCola as part of its promotional campaign. Doctorow later relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years, helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before leaving the EFF to pursue writing full-time in January 2006; Doctorow remained a Fellow of the EFF for some time after he departs from the EFF Staff. He was named the 2006–2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair for Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. He was sponsored jointly by the Royal Fulbright Commission, the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. The professorship included a one-year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, United States. He then returned to London but remained a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.
2009 Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. He was a student in the program during 1993–94 but left without completing a thesis. Doctorow was also a Visiting Professor at the Open University in the United Kingdom from September 2009 to August 2010. In 2012, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from The Open University. Doctorow married Alice Taylor in October 2008; they have a daughter named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, born in 2008. Doctorow became a British citizen by naturalization on 12 August 2011. In 2015, Doctorow decided to leave London and move to Los Angeles, expressing disappointment at London’s “death” after Britain chose a Conservative government; he stated at the time, “London is a city whose two priorities are being a playground for corrupt global elites who turn neighbourhoods into soulless collections of empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, and encouraging the feckless criminality of the finance industry. These two facts are not unrelated.”
He rejoined the EFF in January 2015 to campaign for the eradication of digital rights management (DRM). Doctorow left Boing Boing in January 2020 and soon started a solo blogging project titled Pluralistic. The circumstances surrounding Doctorow’s exit from the website were unclear at the time, although Doctorow acknowledged that he remained a co-owner of Boing Boing. Given the end of the 19-year association between Doctorow and Boing Boing, MetaFilter described this news as “the equivalent of the Beatles breaking up” for the blog world. Doctorow’s exit was not acknowledged by Boing Boing, with his name being quietly removed from the list of editors on 29 January 2020.
Cory Doctorow
