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Friday 18 June 2010
Cory Doctorow's "For the Win"

First things first: Have you read sci-fi-novelist/cyber-rights-polemicist Cory Doctorow’s latest, For the Win? And if not, why on earth are you reading this blog instead? Seriously: Most of what you could learn from seven years’ worth of Terra Novan scribblings on the meanings of virtual economies, the seductions of MMOs, and the emergence of digital play as a global socioeconomic force can be learned more quickly and more pleasurably from this gripping tale of epic, continent-hopping virtual class struggle — a “young adult” thriller for the young adult in all of us (or perhaps the budding games scholar in every young adult) starring that unlikeliest of literary heroes and most culturally fraught of online-gaming personae, the Chinese gold farmer.

Wednesday 12 May 2010
Cory Doctorow: For The Win

Below you’ll find lnks to downloadable editions of the text of For the Win. These downloads are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which lets you share it, remix it, and share your remixes, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis. Some people don’t understand why I do this — so check out this post if you want my topline explanation for why I do this crazy thing.

Monday 10 May 2010
Cory Doctorow Gets Phished

(via Bruce Schneier)

Saturday 10 April 2010

If there’s one lie more corrosive to creativity above all others, it is the lie of romantic individual originality. Today, ‘copyright curriculum’ warns schoolchildren not to be ‘copycats’ - to come up with their own original notions. We are that which copies. Three or four billion years ago, by some process that we don’t understand, molecules began to copy themselves. We are the distant descendants of those early copyists - copying is in our genes. We have a word for things that don’t copy: ‘dead’. Walk the streets of Florence and you’ll find a ‘David’ on every corner: because for half a millennium, Florentine sculptors have learned their trade by copying (but try to take a picture of ‘David’ on his plinth and you’ll be tossed out by a security guard who wants to end this great tradition in order to encourage you to buy a penny postcard). I learned to write by copying. In 1977, when I was six, my father took me to ‘Star Wars’. I couldn’t figure out how a made-up story could be so exciting, so I went home, stapled some paper together and trimmed it to book size, and wrote out the story as best I remembered it, doing it over and over again as I strove to unpick it. Today, I earn my living by copying: taking ideas that excite me and combining them in ways that are mine, but never wholly mine. If copyright law is to truly nurture art and creativity, rather than merely lining the pockets of the last generation of copyists who now declare themselves to be pure of all replication and wholly original from the first word to the last, it *must* recognize and celebrate the wonderful thing that is copying. Cory Doctorow

Tuesday 29 December 2009

When I buy an audiobook on CD, it’s mine. The license agreement, such as it is, is “don’t violate copyright law,” and I can rip that CD to mp3, I can load it to my iPod or any number of devises—it’s mine; I can give it away, I can sell it; it’s mine. But when you buy an audiobook through Audible, which now controls 90 per cent of the [downloadable] audiobook market, you get a license agreement, not a property interest. The things that you can do with it are limited by DRM; the players you can play it on are limited by the license agreements with Audible. Audible doesn’t do this because the publishers ask them to. Audible and iTunes, because Audible is the sole supplier to iTunes, do this because it’s in their own interest.… …Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right. These people were readers before they were publishers before they were writers before they worked in the legal department before they were agents before they were salespeople and marketers. We are the people of the book, and we need to start acting like it. Cory Doctorow

Friday 4 September 2009

The tech press is full of people who want to tell you how completely awesome life is going to be when everything moves to “the cloud” – that is, when all your important storage, processing and other needs are handled by vast, professionally managed data-centres. Here’s something you won’t see mentioned, though: the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes. Cory Doctorow

Saturday 20 June 2009

Copyright is a powerful weapon, and it grows more powerful every day, as lawmakers extend its reach and strength. Funny thing about powerful weapons, though: Unless you know how to use them, they make lousy equalizers. As they say in self-defense courses, “Any weapon you don’t know how to use belongs to your opponent.” Recording artists get an extra 45 years of copyright, and it’s promptly taken from them by the all-powerful record labels, who then use it to strengthen their power by extending their grasp over distribution channels. Authors are given the right to control indexing of their works, and it’s promptly scooped up by Google, who can use it to prevent competitors from giving authors a better deal. For so long as copyright holders think like short-timers, seeking a quick buck instead of a healthy competitive marketplace, they’re doomed to work for their gatekeepers, rather than the other way around. Cory Doctorow

Tuesday 2 June 2009
Cory Doctorow: Search is too important to leave to one company – even Google

Melvin Dewey didn’t predict computers; he also mixed Islam in with Sufism, and gave table-knocking psychics their own category. A full-contact sport like the internet just doesn’t lend itself to a priori categorisation.

Enter search. Who needs categories, if you can just pile up all the world’s knowledge every which way and use software to find the right document at just the right time?

But this is not without risk: search engines accumulate near-complete indexes of our interests, our loves, our hopes and aspirations. Our relationship with them is as intimate as our relationships with our lovers, our confessors, our therapists.

What’s more, the way that search engines determine the ranking and relevance of any given website has become more critical than the editorial berth at the New York Times combined with the chief spots at the major TV networks. Good search engine placement is make-or-break advertising. It’s ideological mindshare. It’s relevance.

Contrariwise: being poorly ranked by a search engine makes you irrelevant, broke and invisible.

What’s more, search engines routinely disappear websites for violating unpublished, invisible rules. Many of these sites are spammers, link-farmers, malware sneezers and other gamers of the system. That’s not surprising: every complex ecosystem has its parasites, and the Internet is as complex as they come. The stakes for search-engine placement are so high that it’s inevitable that some people will try anything to get the right placement for their products, services, ideas and agendas. Hence the search engine’s prerogative of enforcing the death penalty on sites that undermine the quality of search.

It’s a terrible idea to vest this much power with one company, even one as fun, user-centered and technologically excellent as Google. It’s too much power for a handful of companies to wield.

Thursday 23 April 2009

The entertainment industry wants to retreat to the comfort of 1996. It was a good year for them. CDs were selling briskly, but no one had figured out how to rip them and turn them into MP3s yet. Music fans were still spending money to buy CD versions of music they owned on LP. DVDs had just been released, and movie fans were spending money to buy DVDs for movies they already owned on VHS. And most importantly, the laws regulating copyright and technology were almost entirely designed by the entertainment industry. They could write anydamnfoolthing and get it passed in Congress, by the UN, in the EU. Cory Doctorow

Wednesday 14 January 2009

Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, “correcting” your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on. The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for entering text into a computer. They don’t write their software with Word. They use a text-editor, like vi, Emacs, TextPad, BBEdit, Gedit, or any of a host of editors. These are some of the most venerable, reliable, powerful tools in the history of software (since they’re at the core of all other software) and they have almost no distracting features — but they do have powerful search-and-replace functions. Best of all, the humble .txt file can be read by practically every application on your computer, can be pasted directly into an email, and can’t transmit a virus. Cory Doctorow

Sunday 9 November 2008

Because if copying on the Internet were ended tomorrow, it would be the end of culture on the Internet too. YouTube would vanish without its storehouse of infringing clips; LiveJournal would be dead without all those interesting little user-icons and those fascinating pastebombs from books, news-stories and blogs; Flickr would dry up and blow away without all those photos of copyrighted, trademarked and otherwise protected objects, works, and scenes. Cory Doctorow

Wednesday 18 June 2008

Outside of dramatically failed experiments like the Soviet Union and East Germany, policing has never been a business of gathering data on every single person and arresting the guilty ones. This doesn’t catch guilty people, it ensnares the innocent and acts as a kind of monetary black hole, absorbing all the cash we can toss into it, growing larger and more voracious by the day. Too much data ruins the investigation, every time. Cory Doctorow

Monday 7 January 2008

Frankly, the only way to police the net for infringement is to throttle it. And that’s exactly what the proactive policing that many artists are calling for would do. If web-hosting platforms are legally required to prevent their users from infringing, the only way to accomplish this would be to severely limit who got to use the service, either by introducing high user-fees or simply telling the majority of us to piss off and go back to writing in our diaries at home. Cory Doctorow

Friday 28 December 2007

The copyright wars are a form of contemporary Lysenkoism, a farce wherein we all pretend that copy-proof bits are a reasonable thing to expect from technology. Stalin’s Lysenkoism starved millions when the ideologically correct wheat failed to grow and anyone who pointed this out was sent to dissident prison. Entertainment industry Lysenkoism is ruining lives, undermining free speech and privacy and due process, destroying foreign democracies and keeping poor countries poor. It’s about time we wised up to it—and we are. Cory Doctorow

Tuesday 27 November 2007

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: “So-and-so has sent you a message.” Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn’t telling — you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren’t helpful messages, they’re eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote “Hi again!” on your “wall.” Like other “social” apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, “I know something, I know something, I know something, won’t tell you what it is! Cory Doctorow

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