About Cory Doctorow

photo by Bart Nagel, click for high-rez

Hi. I’m Cory Doctorow, and like everyone with a personal website, mine is horribly, terribly out of date. I’m revising this bio on January 1, 2006. If today is more than six months since then, you can assume that most of this is no longer valid and shouldn’t be used in, oh, say, the program book of a conference or a newspaper article. Email me and I’ll send you something up to date.

I do a bunch of things: I’m an activist, a writer, a blogger, a public speaker, and a technology person.

I write science fiction novels — three published to date (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, 2003, Eastern Standard Tribe, 2004, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, 2005), and a short story collection (A Place So Foreign and Eight More, 2003). These novels sell well, win awards, and are published by Tor Books (novels) and Avalon Books (collection). They’re also given away for free on the Internet as Creative Commons-licensed downloads. They can be freely shared, and in some cases, remixed or translated and sold in developing countries.

I believe that we live in an era where anything that can be expressed as bits will be. I believe that bits exist to be copied. Therefore, I believe that any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb, and that lawmakers who try to prop these up are like governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the sides of active volcanoes. Me, I’m looking to find ways to use copying to make more money and it’s working: enlisting my readers as evangelists for my work and giving them free ebooks to distribute sells more books. As Tim O’Reilly says, my problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. Best of all, giving away ebooks gives me lots of key insights into how to make money without restricting the copying of bits. It’s a win-win situation.

I write other stuff: I’m on the mastheads at magazines like Wired, Popular Science and MAKE. I freelance for newspapers like the New York Times, and I contribute to lots of websites, like Salon. I also co-wrote a nonfiction book called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (2000), with Karl Schroeder.

I’m the co-editor of Boing Boing, a very popular weblog about technology, culture, and politics. My three co-editors and I publish to about 1.7 million unique readers a day (as of Jan 1, 2006), and we’re the most linked-to blog on the Internet, according to Technorati. It’s as fun as fun can be: I get to write what I want and I get to bounce around ideas that end up in articles and books.

From 2002-2006 I was the Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a technology advocacy nonprofit that works to upload liberty in technology law, policy and standards. I worked at the United Nations, at standards bodies, at governments, and with universities and non-profits to agitate for a balanced approach to copyright that didn’t trammel the public’s fundamental rights to privacy, free speech, and due process. I retired from EFF after nearly four years in January 2006, in order to focus more on writing, but I remain a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and continue to work closely with my colleagues there.

I serve on a number of boards of directors and advisory boards, including those of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Open Rights Group, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, Inc, Onion Networks, and others; as well as the confernece committee for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I co-founded the open source P2P technology company OpenCola, which was sold to OpenText in 2003.

I was born in Toronto, Canada, on July 17, 1971. I lived there until I was 29, with the exception of brief stints in Baja California, Mexico and northern Costa Rica. My parents are Trotskyist schoolteachers: my mom recently retired from early childhood education, my dad’s a retired math and computer science teacher. At an early age, my dad exposed me to both science-fiction and computers, and I’ve never really had any doubt that my life would be full of both. I learned to type before I learned to write cursively (which explains my execrable handwriting), and have spent most of my life behind a keyboard. I also have a wonderful kid brother, Neil, and a fantastic sister-in-law, Tara Lee.

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