Cory Doctorow on the Information Age

My partially-self-imposed silence has meant that I’ve got a long list of things I’ve wanted to blog about, a state that Sean has often claimed he’s in.  And one of the things I wanted to bring to your attention was Cory Doctorow’s 30 minute session being an Author@Google.  Here’s the link; I’ve also put it into my VodPod to make it easier.

He makes a beautiful argument for the Because Effect inherent in the Web, and for the way this generates wealth; somewhere along the line he shows just how Luddite we are becoming as a result of poorly thought out DRM (and similarly poorly-thought-out IPR in general); he takes us on an almost-tangential journey through some of the implications from the viewpoint of world trade and economic development; and he does all this with his trade-mark wry sense of humour (what did our futurists come up with? Not Google. Not even Expedia. But eBooks….).

The Luddism argument is particularly strong, something I’m sure many of you have considered before, something I know I have considered before. What Cory does is bring his storyteller strengths into the exposition of the argument. Delightful.

I’ve known Cory for a while now, not particularly well but well enough to know that we share common viewpoints on many things. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you do, just to understand the kind of damage that can be wrought by bad DRM, and just how unnecessary and avoidable this is.

My thanks to Cory for a very entertaining half-hour. (Nb: The clip is actually an hour long when you take in the Q&A session at the end, where for some reason the sound quality dips).

3 thoughts on “Cory Doctorow on the Information Age”

  1. Even more concerning than Luddism is the emergence of a U.S. version of Lysenkoism. This is where certain laws (read Copyright, DMCA, Induce, etc..) act a punitive mechanism against those who do not have the correct values and beliefs. Skip straight to around the 19 minute mark for his explanation.

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