Cory Docotorow Maker Faire Keynote

A keynote presentation by Cory Doctorow at Mini Maker Faire Meetup on Sunday, 7th July 2013.

Posted in video Tagged with: copyright, cory doctorow, makers

Lost in Translation

I’ve previously blogged about a “new” German DRM scheme to change the text of a book each time it’s copied. Well, Cory Doctorow’s got something to say about it:

Shortcomings aside, this kind of DRM is hardly a breakthrough. I first encountered this proposal in the late 1980s, when it came up in a message board on the Science Fiction Round Table on GEnie, an online messaging service. I remember at first thinking that it sounded very clever, until someone pointed out that all it would take to de-identify a text would be to find two or more copies, compare them, make note of the differences, and randomly vary them. That’s easily done—a simple text comparison has been a largely solved problem since the advent of the Unix “diff” command, developed in the early 1970s.

But the fact that the basis behind this security measure was countered 25 years ago by employing a simple tool that’s getting into its 40s is not the silliest part of this supposed new DRM breakthrough. No, the silliest part is the idea that knowing who an e-book was sold to can actually serve as an effective means of fighting piracy. That belief rests on the idea that if you know to whom a file was sold, you can somehow take it out of their hide if you find lots of copies floating around on the Internet.

Read the full article @ PublishersWeekly.com.

Posted in ebooks Tagged with: cory doctorow, drm

Neil Gaiman’s Guardian Books podcast: Weird London and the future for writers

This week’s podcast heads into strange territory, guided by the Books site’s editor-for-a-day, Neil Gaiman.

First, we follow Damien Walter on the trail of Weird London, a parallel city that has been built on the banks of another Thames by writers of fantasy fiction. He explores why the capital has made such fertile ground for writers who look beyond the real, along with Tom Pollock, M John Harrison and the owner of the Atlantis Bookshop, Geraldine Beskin.

Back in the studio, Cory Doctorow outlines how the digital revolution is transforming writers’ lives. But how are authors to make money? The agent Jonny Geller and the head of Faber Digital, Henry Volans, investigate how writers can survive in a new publishing landscape.

We finish with a live reading by Neil Gaiman of the haunting story he contributed to the Guardian’s Water stories, Down to a Sunless Sea.

Listen @ Guardian.co.uk.

Posted in Audio, Books, Fun Tagged with: cory doctorow, neil gaiman, radio, uk