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Double Doctorow: World changer, monster maker

WorldChanging, a progressive futurist content-blog, interviews Cory Doctorow about the rising importance of fair international intellectual property law:

So, imagine being a development-oriented broadcaster with a low-power FM transmitter in, say, rural Costa Rica (where I used to live), servicing Nicaraguan refugees by taking information that you receive from distant stations with your big antenna — public health information, distance learning, government announcements — and splicing it together with locally-relevant public affairs programming and retransmit it, that becomes unlawful under the Broadcast Treaty.

AS: Even if all the pieces of that content were originally Creative Commons, or open source, or free use, or public domain, or whatever.

CD: Yep. If they were factual, if they were government transmissions, whatever. Things that aren’t subject to copyright.

Doctorow, of course, works for the copyfight org Electronic Frontier Foundation. He runs one to five copyfight entries in Boing Boing daily. His fiction, also, is infused with ideas about info freedom. The Globe and Mail runs a review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, his new present-day-Toronto novel:

At first, the main character, Alan, seems normal enough. He’s a middle-aged guy who’s just moved to the Kensington Market area. His neighbour, Mimi, appears fairly normal, too, except that she grows enormous, leathery wings unless her vicious boyfriend periodically saws them off. Doctorow presents these details straight-faced, amid the everyday scenery of Kensington and Toronto.

Then, as Alan spearheads a scheme to blanket Toronto in a free wireless network, Doctorow launches into flashbacks to Alan’s mysterious childhood. Alan is a monster. He grew up in a cave. And as an adult, he has the sense that his past is haunting his present.

Cory Doctorow, the transhumanist Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Tags: CoryDoctorow, bookreview, interview

This entry was posted by Nick Douglas on Saturday, July 30th, 2005 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Cory Doctorow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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