Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future

Hailed by Bruce Sterling as “a political activist, gizmo freak, junk collector, programmer, entrepreneur, and all-around Renaissance geek,” the Internet’s favorite high-tech culture maven is celebrated with the first collection of his infamous articles, essays, and polemics.

Irreverently championing free speech and universal access to information—even if it’s just a free download of the newest Britney Spears MP3—he leads off with a mutinous talk given at Microsoft on digital rights management, insisting that they stop treating their customers as criminals.

Readers will discover how America chose Happy Meal toys over copyright, why Facebook is taking a faceplant, how the Internet is basically just a giant Xerox machine, why Wikipedia is a poor cousin of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and how to enjoy free e-books.

Practicing what he preaches, all of the author’s books, including this one, are simultaneously released in print and on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their reuse and sharing. He argues persuasively that this practice has considerably increased his sales by enlisting readers to promote his work.

Accessible to geeks and nontechies alike, this is a timely collection from an author who effortlessly surfs the zeitgeist while always generating his own wave.

Reviews (Amazon.com):
"Doctorow here proves he's smart, funny, and good at accessibly boiling down issues he's passionate about . . . a pleasure to read, not to mention thought-provoking."  —Booklist

"Cory Doctorow straps on his miner's helmet and takes you deep into the caverns and underground rivers of pop culture."  —Neil Gaiman, author, American Gods

"We should all hope and trust that our culture has the guts and moxie to follow this guy. He's got a lot to tell us."  —Bruce Sterling, author, Zeitgeist

"Cory Doctorow is the apotheosis of what we talk about when we talk about the Web."  —SF Site

Download Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future

PDF format, 4.1MB, 240Pages.

Publisher: Tachyon Publications (September 15, 2008)
Author: Cory Doctorow
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1892391813
ISBN-13: 978-1892391810

CONTENTS:
xv Foreword for Content | John Perry Barlow
3 Microsoft Research DRM Talk
27 The DRM Sausage Factory
39 Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America Chose
Hollywood and Wal-Mart, and Why It’s Doomed Us,
and How We Might Survive Anyway
45 Why Is Hollywood Making a Sequel to the Napster Wars?
51 You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen
55 How Do You Protect Artists?
59 It’s the Information Economy, Stupid
63 Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever
67 What’s the Most Important Right Creators Have?
71 Giving it Away
77 Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough
About to Steal on the Internet
83 How Copyright Broke
89 In Praise of Fanfic
95 Metacrap: Putting the Torch to Seven Straw-Men of the
Meta-Utopia
105 Amish for QWERTY
109 Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
133 Free(konomic) Ebooks
139 The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights
145 When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device:
An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil
159 Wikipedia: A Genuine HG2G — Minus the Editors
171 Warhol Is Turning in His Grave
175 The Future of Ignoring Things
179 Facebook’s Faceplant
185 The Future of Internet Immune Systems
189 All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites
197 READ CAREFULLY
201 World of Democracycraft
207 Snitchtown
211 About the author
213 About the author of the Foreword

Visit Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future Website

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is an award-winning novelist, activist, blogger, and journalist. He is the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net), one of the most popular blogs in the world, and has contributed to the New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Economist, Forbes, Popular Science, Wired, Make, InformationWeek, Locus, Salon, Radar, and many other magazines, newspapers, and websites.

His novels and short story collections include Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, and his most recent novel, a political thriller for young adults called Little Brother, published by Tor Books in May 2008. All of his novels and short story collections are available as free downloads under the terms of various Creative Commons licenses.

Doctorow is the former European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) and has participated in many treatymaking, standards-setting, and regulatory and legal battles in countries all over the world. In 2006/2007, he was the inaugural Canada/U.S. Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. In 2007, he was also named one of the World Economic Forum’s “Young Global Leaders” and one of Forbes magazine’s top 25 “Web Celebrities.”

Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1971, he is a four-time university dropout. He now resides in London, England, with his wife and baby daughter, where he does his best to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance cameras while roaming the world, speaking on copyright, freedom, and the future.

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