From: Cory Doctorow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sun, 1 Jan 2006 07:55:41 +0100
For the first time in my life, I am a full-time writer. Effective
today, I'm no longer an employee -- effective today, I'm a full-time,
freelance word-maker. It's something I've dreamt of since I was 12
years old, and now it's a reality. Whew. Scary.
It's an amazing feeling.
It was a hard decision to make. For the past four years, I've been in
the employ of the Electronic Frontier Foundation , a nonprofit
organization that has repeatedly kept the online world safe for you
and me -- that has preserved our fundamental liberties in the new
digital world. Whether it's fighting warrantless wiretaps, the
criminalization of hundreds of millions of file-sharers, or greedy
encroachments on the public domain, EFF is there, winning substantial
and critical victories.
Working for EFF has been an education. Watching the sausage of law
get ground up and stuffed into its casings is something that changes
you -- changes the way you think about the world and its secret
workings.
So the hardest part of this decision wasn't the worry about financial
insecurity: it was the difficulty of saying goodbye to the most
meaningful, rewarding and challenging job I've ever had. It was
saying goodbye to the best, smartest, most committed and most
effective activists I've ever had the privilege of knowing, in a
lifetime of activism.
Luckily for me, I didn't have to make a binary decision. I'm
delighted to announce that EFF has named me a Fellow of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, an honor I share with attorney James
Tyre. As a Fellow, I'm still within the scope of EFF's attorney-
client confidentiality and hence able to contribute on active cases.
EFF has a problem: we work on issues before anyone knows that they
matter. In 2002, we were at the inaugural meeting on the Broadcast
Flag, and we spent the next two years explaining to everyone we could
find what this stuff was and why it mattered. We published on the
risks of Trusted Computing before anyone had a clue that this isn't
just a security technology: it's a system for gutting competition in
the market and user choice and privacy by subjecting computers to
control by remote parties. We're at the Broadcast Treaty meetings at
the UN, trying to get the big IT companies to understand that if its
provisions come to pass, they'll need permission from the
entertainment companies to launch new services like Google Video and
new devices like the Video iPod. We've been sounding the alarm over
the Analog Hole, over paperless electronic voting machines, over DRM,
since the earliest days.
EFF are canaries in the coal-mine, the first responders of
cyberspace, building coalitions and briefing lawmakers, users and
companies on the risks coming down the pipe. This is a critical job:
if the resistance to these issues only mobilized once their risks had
percolated out to the wide world, it would be too late. You need to
start work on these issues as they are born, not when they are about
to mature.
But the problem is that this makes EFF into an organization whose
core issues are hard to explain to the mass audience, or even to the
mass audience of geeks (witness the number of online posts that
mangle our issues). Everyone wants to describe the Broadcast Flag as
a system for stopping you from recording video, but that's just not
true, and if you go around saying it, lawmakers will think you're
full of it. The Broadcast Flag's danger is much deeper and subtler:
it puts the features of electronics and computers under the veto of
entertainment companies, who intend to use this veto to block any
features that disrupt their business models. That's a lot scarier --
but it's also more abstract and wordier. Saying that the issue isn't
recording, but freedom to build better recorders is true, and it's
also hard to make understood.
I've been privileged to participate in a years-long effort on the
part of EFF to make these issues more accessible without sacrificing
accuracy. It's working. Our membership rolls have swollen, our staff
has too. Geeks and civilians around the world have opened their
wallets and have contributed signatures, code, and advocacy. You can,
too: donations to EFF are tax-deductible, and there are many other
ways to contribute.
So what am I going to be doing now that I don't have a day-job? Well
for starters, I'm going to be getting a full night's sleep every
night. I'm going to stop travelling three weeks a month. I'm going to
join the gym and get the hundred and a half household chores I've
neglected while working three full-time jobs for the past two years
done. I'm going to get a checkup and have my teeth x-rayed. All that
overdue stuff I've put off and put off and put off.
Most importantly, though: I'm going to *write*. More blog posts, and
longer ones. I have three novellas in the pipe. I'm tripling the pace
of work on Themepunks, my fourth novel, and plan to have it in the
can by early spring. I'm going to do a fix-up novel with Charlie
Stross, completing our "Huw" stories (Jury Service and Appeals Court)
and publishing them between covers. My podcast is going thrice
weekly. I've got articles in production for a bunch of magazines and
websites.
I'm not giving up on travel altogether. I'm still going to be
speaking at various companies and conventions and seminars on
technology, authorship and copyright, but a lot less of that. I'll be
spending most of April in Australia, New Zealand and Japan at various
speaking gigs and conventions like ConJure, the national Aussie SF
con in Brisbane; I'm a guest of honor at Boskone in Boston in
February; I'll be at the LIFT conference in Geneva in January and a
Red Hat con in Nashville in June. But for all that, I'm going to be
spending approximately 1000 percent more time sitting in one place,
concentrating on one task. I can't wait.
I'm also going to be working on numerous civil liberties causes. I'm
proud to serve on the Boards of Directors for two great charities,
the Participatory Culture Foundation , creators of the indie
Internet TV platform DTV and the MetaBrainz Foundation , which
oversees development of the MusicBrainz system for distributing free,
rich metadata about music.
There's also some big plans for a long, nonfiction DRM-book/research
project lurking around here. With any luck I'll be able to announce
more about that in late January or early February.
This is the most exciting day of my life -- the day I quit my day-
job. Thanks to everyone who made this possible, all the readers and
bloggers and friends and editors and agents. I'll do my best not to
screw it up!
EFF: http://eff.org
Contribute to EFF: http://action.eff.org/site/PageServer?
pagename=ADV_homepage
Participatory Culture Foundation: http://participatoryculture.org
Metabrainz Foundation: http://metabrainz.org/
--
Cory Doctorow
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
