Cory Doctorow (born July 17, 1971) is a blogger, journalist and science
fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is in favor of
liberalizing copyright laws, and a proponent of the Creative Commons organisation, and uses some of their licenses for his books. Some common themes of his
work include digital rights management, file
sharing, Disney, and post-scarcity
economics.
Biography
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Trotskyist teachers,[1] Doctorow was raised in an activist household, working in the
nuclear disarmament movement and as a Greenpeace
campaigner as a child. He later served on the board of directors for the Grindstone
Island Co-operative on Big Rideau Lake, Ontario, helping to run a conference center devoted to
peace and social justice education and activist training. He received his high school
diploma from a free school in Toronto called SEED School, and dropped out of four
universities without attaining a degree.
Doctorow moved to Los Angeles, California
in mid-2006 from London, England, where he had worked as
European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for
four years, 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. Doctorow spent
the 2006-2007 academic year teaching as a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, despite not holding any academic degree.[2] He then returned to London. He is a frequent public speaker on
copyright issues.
Fiction
Doctorow's first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
was published in January 2003, and was the first novel released under one of the Creative Commons licenses. The license allowed 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, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was re-released under a different Creative Commons license that
allowed derivative works such as fan fiction, but still prohibited commercial usage. A
semi-sequel short story called Truncat was published on Salon.com in August 2003.
Doctorow's other two novels use Creative Commons licenses that prohibit derived works and commercial usage and have followed the
model of making digital versions available, without charge, at the same time that the print versions are published.
He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in
2000, the Locus Award for Best First Novel for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in 2003, and in 2004 he won the Sunburst
award for best Canadian Science Fiction Book for his short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More. This collection also contained his short story
"0wnz0red", which was
nominated for the 2003 Nebula Award.
Other
Cory Doctorow at a summit at Stanford in 2006
In 2006, Doctorow 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, 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.
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 discussing his own article on
Wikipedia. In the same year, he delivered a talk to Microsoft's Research Group related to copyright, technology, and DRM.[3]
He served as Canadian Regional Director of the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1999. 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 in the summer of
2003.
Together with Austrian art group monochrom he initiated the Instant Blitz Copy Fight project. People from all over
the world are asked to take flash pictures of copyright warnings in movie theaters.
Cory's parents have suggested that he is related to author E.L. Doctorow, but E.L.
Doctorow himself could not confirm (or deny) the family connection.[4]
Bibliography
- The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing
Science Fiction [1]
(self-help, Alpha Books, 2000)
- Essential Blogging
(tech help, O'Reilly and Associates, 2003)
- Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (novel, Tor Books, 2003)
released under a Creative Commons License.
- (Truncat
(short story) -- a quasi-sequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom)
- A Place So Foreign and Eight More (short story collection,
Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003)
- Eastern Standard Tribe (novel, Tor Books 2004) released under a
Creative Commons License.
- i, robot
(Hugo nominated short story, InfiniteMatrix.net, 2005)
- 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
- Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (novel,
Tor Books, 2005)
- /usr/bin/god (working title) (novel; forthcoming, Tor Books)
- Little Brother (working title) (novel; forthcoming, Tor Books)
- . (online text).
- Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (short
story collection, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007) ISBN 1560259817
- There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow / Now is the Best Time of Your Life (Novella, forthcoming)
References
External links
Wikisource has original works written by or about:
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| Persondata |
| NAME |
Doctorow, Cory |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES |
|
| SHORT DESCRIPTION |
Journalist. Author |
| DATE OF BIRTH |
1971-07-17 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH |
Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| DATE OF DEATH |
|
| PLACE OF DEATH |
|
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