A conversation with Cory Doctorow

On Activism

bit-tech: So enough of all the chat, what can bit-tech readers do today to try and move our world in the direction of open content and away from crippling DRM and industry monopolies?

Cory: There are a bunch of things you can do. I don't necessarily advocate boycotting DRM'd media, because with DVDs it's kind of a non-starter. Telling people not to watch movies? You know, if the prerequisite for joining a popular movement is to not watch movies, that's a little silly.

But what you can do is wherever there's a free choice, you can take it.

With films, that might be to sign up for cable and get an analogue to digital converter. You can plug in and get your movies that way, without the crippleware, or get them off P2P - that's one way to get out of the DRM lockbox.

I think that joining FreeCulture, joining EFF is a really important step, because understanding that there's a political dimension to this is also crucial.

This whole thing isn't just about wanting stuff for free, it's about understanding that information is built either in architectures of control or architectures of liberty and that the job of the EFF etc. is to make sure that architectures of liberty dominate. The EFF wins big, substantial battles on these subjects every year.

If you're in the UK, hold the BBC to account. Why is it shipping the IMP, a DRM crippled player? Is there a point in the future where the BBC imagines that bits are going to get harder to copy? And that the IMP will solve its problem? Really, what the BBC is saying is that there's two ways you can get its content after it airs on the TV; one is that you can get it through the IMP and have a crippled experience, the other is that you can be a criminal. If you want to get BBC content in a way that you want to use it, in a way that the law says you can use it, you have to be a criminal first. As a UK license payer, you've already paid for this content.

Finally, use Creative Commons licenses in your work. Last year, there was a proposal to build a harmonised DRM specification for the European Union, and one of the things they said is that we should embark on this in a way that would eliminate unencrypted works - period. They said that all works should be encrypted in some form.

Well what we were able to say is that there have been 53 million Creative Commons works created in the last 36 months, all of them prohibiting using scrambling, using DRM in connection with them. This proposal would take the authors of those 53 million works - who are creators every bit as much as anyone else - and lock them out of the market place.

So that's how you can help.

Our thanks to Cory for taking time out of his ludicrously busy schedule to talk to us. You can read more of Cory every day at Boing Boing, or you can check out his personal webpage over at Craphound.com. His latest novel is 'Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town'.