Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 54

Car Wars: a dystopian science fiction story about the nightmare of self-driving cars

Melbourne’s Deakin University commissioned me to write a science fiction story about the design and regulation of self-driving cars, inspired by my essay about the misapplication of the “Trolley Problem” to autonomous vehicles.

The story, Car Wars, takes the form of a series of vignettes that illustrate the problem with designing cars to control their drivers, interspersed with survey questions to spur discussion of the wider issues of governments and manufacturers being able to control t...

I’m helping launch Echoes of Sherlock Homes at LA’s Chevalier Books tomorrow night

In 2014, lawyer and eminent Sherlockian Les Klinger comprehensively won the legal battle to establish that Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain and available for anyone to use, abuse, alter, celebrate or mock; now with a new anthology of completely unauthorized Sherlock tales, Echoes of Sherlock Holmes, Klinger and co-editor Laurie R. King have shown just how much life there is in the old tales.

I’m one of the contributors to the anthology. My story, “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure o...

Sole and Despotic Dominion: how a 20th century copyright law is abolishing property for humans (but not corporations)

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In the 18th century, William Blackstone wrote the seminal “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” which contained one of the foundational definitions of property: “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”

Today, software enabled devices can and are controlled by their manufacturers long after they’ve been sold on to customers, and laws like Section 120...

Interview with IEEE-USA Insight Podcast

I was interviewed for the IEEE-USA Insight Podcast last summer in New Orleans, during their Future Leaders Summit, where I was privileged to give the keynote (MP3)

Talking about Allan Sherman on the Comedy on Vinyl podcast

Jason Klamm stopped my office to interview me for his Comedy on Vinyl podcast, where I talked about the first comedy album I ever loved: Allan Sherman’s My Son, the Nut.

I inherited my mom’s copy of the album when I was six years old, and listened to it over and over until I discovered — the hard way — that you can’t leave vinyl records on the dashboard of a car on a hot day.

Our discussion ranged far and wide, over the golden age of novelty flexidiscs, Thomas Piketty, Hamilton, corporat...

Apply for a Shuttleworth Fellowship!

https://vimeo.com/54762523

I’m the “Honourary Steward” for this year’s Shuttleworth Fellowship, this being a valuable and prestigious prize given to people who are undertaking to make the world a better, more open place (“social innovators who are helping to change the world for the better and could benefit from a social investment model with a difference”).

Being Honourary Steward means that I help choose the grantees; I’m the second Honourary Steward, following in Joi Ito’s footsteps....

Come see me in Portland, Riverside, LA, and San Francisco

I’ve got a busy couple of weeks coming up! I’m speaking tomorrow at Powell’s in Portland, OR for Banned Books Week; on Wednesday, I’m at UC Riverside speaking to a Philosophy and Science Fiction class; on Friday I’ll be at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, speaking on Canada’s dark decade of policy denial from climate science to digital locks; and then on Oct 6, I’m coming to SFMOMA to talk about museums, technology, and free culture. I hope to see you soon!

(Image: Al...

How free software stayed free

I did an interview with the Changelog podcast (MP3) about my upcoming talk at the O’Reilly Open Source conference in London, explaining how it is that the free and open web became so closed and unfree, but free and open software stayed so very free, and came to dominate the software landscape.

“Desperate” is often the opposite of “open”: it’s when we’re in trouble that we’re most likely to compromise on our principles. How, then, did open become the default for so many tools and applicat...

If DRM is so great, why won’t anyone warn you when you’re buying it?

Last month, I filed comments with the Federal Trade Commission on behalf of Electronic Frontier Foundation, 22 of EFF’s supporters, and a diverse coalition of rightsholders, public interest groups, and retailers, documenting the ways that ordinary Americans come to harm when they buy products without realizing that these goods have been encumbered with DRM, and asking the FTC to investigate fair labeling for products that come with sneaky technological shackles.

In my latest Guardian colu...

The privacy wars have been a disaster and they’re about to get a LOT worse

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In my latest Locus column, The Privacy Wars Are About to Get A Whole Lot Worse, I describe the history of the privacy wars to date, and the way that the fiction of “notice and consent” has provided cover for a reckless, deadly form of viral surveillance capitalism.

As bad as things have been, they’re about to get much, much worse: the burgeoning realm of the “Internet of Things” is filled with surveillance devices that you can’t even pretend to give your consent to.

It’s possible that w...