Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow 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 organization, 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.

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 SEED School and dropped out of four universities without attaining a degree.

He moved to Los Angeles from London, England, where he worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, helping to set up the Open Rights Group, before quitting to pursue writing full-time in 2006. Upon his departure, Doctorow was named a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and now teaches at the University of Southern California, despite the fact that he holds no degrees in higher education. He is a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.

Doctorow's first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was published in 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.

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. 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.

Doctorow is the recipient of 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, and 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.

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 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.

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