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Cory Doctorow at SFU
Cory Doctorow: Iconoclast of the blogosphere Perhaps you already have a blog, a personal web log. Imagine what it would be like if two million people read your blog every day. That is the case for Cory Doctorow, Simon Fraser University Applied Sciences' 2007 Leonardo lecturer.
BoingBoing
Cory Doctorow: Iconoclast of the blogosphere
Perhaps you already have a blog, a personal web log. Imagine what it would be like if two million people read your blog every day. That is the case for Cory Doctorow, Simon Fraser University Applied Sciences' 2007 Leonardo lecturer.
Forbes magazine describes Doctorow as "a triple threat." He's a prominent activist for digital rights and currently holds the Canada-US Fulbright chair at the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy. He is co-editor of the most popular blog on Earth (boingboing.net) all about technology, culture and politics. And finally he's an award-winning science fiction writer who gives away all his books via download from his website, craphound.com.
"I don't think it's practical to charge for copies of electronic works," he says. "Bits aren't ever going to get harder to copy. So we'll have to figure out how to charge for something else.... You sure can't force a reader to pay for access to information anymore." Provocative thinking like this has rocketed the Toronto-born, 35-year-old iconoclast to the forefront of the blogosphere. What will he do next?
2007 SFU Applied Sciences Leonardo Lecture:The Totalitarian Urge: total information awareness and the cosmic billiards
About how technology changes the way we view social problems. Older mechanical technologies make us see the world as deterministic, knowable and manipulable. New emergent technologies like the Internet teach us that control is an illusion, the universe is out of control and laughing at us, and that the more we watch and control, the more problems we have.
Doctorow will give the 2007 Leonardo Lecture twice:
Thursday, March 8, 6:00pm at SFU Harbour Centre in the Fletcher Challenge theatre (SOLD OUT)
Friday, March 9, 3:30pm in the AQ room C9001
Short bio:
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is the award-winning author of such science fiction novels and collections as "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" and "Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present." A committed copyfighter, Doctorow previous served as European Affairs Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is presently the Canada-US Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center on Public Diplomacy at USC. He co-edits Boing Boing (boingboing.net), arguably the most popular blog in the world today. In 2007, he was named one of Forbes Magazine's 25 "Web Celebrities" and one of the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders."
Here is his quote on Wikipedia:
"I've been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money."
Here is a quote from his homepage:
"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."