Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Last week I sat down with Mike Masnick, the crusading technology journalist who coined the “Streisand Effect” and runs the fantastic site Techdirt, and we had a good, chewy discussion (MP3) about my new novel Walkaway; he’s just posted it to the Techdirt podcast. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

The National Endowment for the Arts podcast recorded a great, wide-ranging interview with me (MP3) about my novel Walkaway and a variety of subjects, from copyright reform to arts funding to the future of the arts and technology.

Here’s Wil Wheaton reading “Communist Party,” the opening chapter of “Walkaway,” my first novel for adults since 2009’s “Makers.” Wil is joined on the independently produced audiobook by Amber Benson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Amanda Palmer (The Dresden Dolls), Mirron Willis, Gabrielle de Cuir, Lisa Renee Pitts and Justine Eyre. It was directed by Gabrielle de Cuir for Skyboat Media and mastered by John Taylor Williams for Wryneck Studios. You can buy the 15-hour DRM-free audiobook for $24.95 at my shop, or wherever DRM-free audiobooks are sold.

My novel Walkaway came out today and I sat down yesterday with the Author Stories Podcast to talk about writing, publishing, and, of course, the novel.

In the latest episode of Reply All, a fantastic tech podcast, the hosts and producers discuss the situation with DRM, the future of the web, and the W3C — a piece I’ve been working on them with for a year now. The issue is a complicated and eye-glazingly technical one, and they do a genuinely excellent job presenting the story. Inevitably, there’s some nuance lost in the translation, and so here’s a bit more, for people who are interested. The story talks about DRM as an anti-piracy technology. I think that’s just wrong, though DRM advocates walk a confusing line on this question. They freely admit that DRM can be broken by skilled attackers, and that dishonest people can just access versions of movies or songs or whatever that the DRM-breakers have stripped the DRM off of (the Reply All host starts off by describing how he hits all kinds of problems with DRM on movies he pays for, leading him to download easy-to-find cracked versions). So if DRM isn’t anti-piracy, what is it? DRM isn’t really a technology at all, it’s a law. Specifically, it’s section 1201 of the US DMCA (and its international equivalents). Under this law, breaking DRM is a crime with serious consequences (5 years in prison and a $500,000 fine for a first offense), even if you’re doing something that would otherwise be legal. This lets companies treat their commercial strategies as legal obligations: Netflix doesn’t have the legal right to stop you from recording a show to watch later, but they can add DRM that makes it impossible to do so without falling afoul of DMCA. This is the key: DRM makes it possible for companies to ban all unauthorized conduct, even when we’re talking about using your own property in legal ways. This intrudes on your life in three ways: 1. It lets companies sue and threaten security researchers who find defects in products 2. It lets companies sue and threaten accessibility workers who adapt technology for use by disabled people 3. It lets companies sue and threaten competitors who want to let you do more with your property — get it repaired by independent technicians, buy third-party parts and consumables, or use it in ways that the manufacturer just doesn’t like. How do we know that companies only want DRM because they want to abuse this law, and not because they want to fight piracy? Because they told us so. At the W3C, we proposed a compromise: companies who participate at W3C would be allowed to use it to make DRM, but would have to promise not to invoke the DMCA in these ways that have nothing to do with piracy. So far, nearly 50 W3C members — everyone from Ethereum to Brave to the Royal National Institute for Bind People to Lawrence Berkeley National Labs — have endorsed this, and all the DRM-supporting members have rejected it. In effect, these members are saying, “We understand that DRM isn’t very useful for stopping piracy, but that law that lets us sue people who aren’t breaking copyright law? Don’t take that away!” The Director of the W3C, web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, wrote recently about why he supports DRM standardization, an odd step that it hard to understand, really: the leaders of the DRM standardization committee at the W3C have asked Berners-Lee to consult with his members to ask whether they want to see this DRM standard published. Instead, he appears to be telling us what decision he plans on coming to, regardless of how that consultation goes. #90 Matt Lieber Goes To Dinner [Reply All/Gimlet]

Last month, Melbourne’s Deakin University published Car Wars, a short story I wrote to inspire thinking and discussion about the engineering ethics questions in self-driving car design, moving beyond the trite and largely irrelevant trolley problem. Shortly after, I went into Skyboat Media’s studio and recorded an audio edition of the story, which the Deakin folks mastered with visuals and SFX to produce a smashing video. I’ve extracted just the audio as an MP3 for your mobile listening/podcast pleasure, as well.

Kirby Ferguson, who created the remarkable Everything is a Remix series, has a new podcast hosted by the Recreate Coalition called Copy This and he hosted me on the debut episode (MP3) where we talked about copying, creativity, artists, and the future of the internet (as you might expect!). Are you one of the many Star Wars fans eagerly awaiting the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story later this month? As you watch – and rewatch – the trailer, take a break to tune into Re:Create’s new Copy This podcast to learn about copyright and the role it’s played in the success of the fan-favorite series. As part of our ongoing work to elevate the discussion around copyright issues, the role copyright plays in our lives, and the need for balanced laws, Re:Create today launched Copy This hosted by writer, director and remixer Kirby Ferguson. The monthly podcast will bring to listeners conversations with some of the leading authors, policy minds, legal experts, and members of the creative community to take on the important questions and topics driving the copyright debate today. New Re:Create Podcast Shows What Star Wars Can Teach Us About Copyright [Recreate]

I was interviewed for the IEEE-USA Insight Podcast last summer in New Orleans, during their Future Leaders Summit, where I was privileged to give the keynote (MP3)

Jason Klamm stopped my office to interview me for his Comedy on Vinyl podcast, where I talked about the first comedy album I ever loved: Allan Sherman’s My Son, the Nut. I inherited my mom’s copy of the album when I was six years old, and listened to it over and over until I discovered — the hard way — that you can’t leave vinyl records on the dashboard of a car on a hot day. Our discussion ranged far and wide, over the golden age of novelty flexidiscs, Thomas Piketty, Hamilton, corporate anthems and many other subjects. http://media.blubrry.com/comedyonvinyl/p/stolendress.com/comedyonvinyl/podcast_episodes/COV_Episode_199.mp3 Episode 199 – Cory Doctorow on Allan Sherman – My Son, The Nut [Comedy on Vinyl]

I did an interview with the Changelog podcast (MP3) about my upcoming talk at the O’Reilly Open Source conference in London, explaining how it is that the free and open web became so closed and unfree, but free and open software stayed so very free, and came to dominate the software landscape. “Desperate” is often the opposite of “open”: it’s when we’re in trouble that we’re most likely to compromise on our principles. How, then, did open become the default for so many tools and applications? Because when you use irrevocable open/free licenses, you lock your code open, defending it from anyone who would lock it up again—including a future version of you, in a moment of weakness. Open licenses have served us well for more than two decades, but they need help if we’re going to survive the era in which computers invade our bodies and the structures we keep those bodies in. Cory Doctorow explains that we can lock the whole future Web open, if we do it right. #221: How We Got Here with Cory Doctorow [The Changelog] (Image: Tux Droid, Sunny Ripert, CC-BY-SA)