Cory Doctorow drips geek chic. Coeditor of Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net/), often called the world's most popular blog, he's also an award-winning science-fiction author who gives his books away free on-line (www.craphound.com/), a fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a tireless evangelist in the war against top-down copyright. On March 8 and 9, the Toronto native, who now lives in Los Angeles, delivers The Totalitarian Urge: Total Information Awareness and the Cosmic Billiards, the SFU Faculty of Applied Sciences' Leonardo Lecture for 2007. In anticipation of his arrival, Doctorow spoke with the Straight from a cab in North Carolina, en route to the airport.

Georgia Straight: The title of your lecture is The Totalitarian Urge. Why?

Cory Doctorow: The totalitarian urge is the urge that says, “If we can only be a little more controlling, we can solve some of the pernicious problems that we would all agree are bad ones. If only we could keep better track of what people do with their welfare money and be sure that only deserving people would get it, we could give more money to people who deserve more, and so on. We just need a little more surveillance.” And the thing is, the surveillance creates more problems than it solves.

Georgia Straight: Speaking of surveillance, Vancouver is going to play host to the Olympic Games in 2010.

Cory Doctorow: Poor sods.

Georgia Straight: And already measures are coming into play to increase surveillance and control traffic and so on. Because, among other things, people urinate on the streets, for God's sake, when no one's looking.

Cory Doctorow: London, for all its CCTVs [closed-circuit cameras], has actually solved that problem. They put out urinals on Friday night.

Georgia Straight: For people who live here and may not feel comfortable with the Games, what can they do?

Cory Doctorow: We have the Charter. We have Charter rights to be secure in our person. And we have popular resistance. We have the ability to refuse neighbourhood by neighbourhood, place by place, to be surveilled and to cooperate in surveillance. And I think we also have the legitimate right to ask, as people whose security is presumably being endangered by the Games coming to the city, how it is that fictional or nonsensical or theatrical methods are going to make us more secure. If we're going to take them at their word when they tell us that we are going to be made insecure by these Games, then we should hold them to account to explain how it is they're going to make us more secure by adding more cameras all over the place.

In London, where you see cameras you see people who commit crimes and are subsequently caught, but that doesn't mean that they don't commit crimes. And particularly when you're talking about somewhere like Gastown, where I've had two rental cars broken into in two visits, these are not people who make rational decisions about their lives and their freedoms. If they were, they wouldn't be junkies living in Gastown.

Georgia Straight: There's a rumour that after the federal budget comes down, there may be a fair-use clause inserted in our Copyright Act.

Cory Doctorow: Let me actually step back here and tell you that the reason that everyone is making new copyright laws is because in 1996, the World Intellectual Property Organization created what's called the Internet treaties. And as countries sign on, they have to ratify them and implement them in national law.”¦

This has not really happened ever before, that all the countries of the world have simultaneously updated their copyright law. So this is a really weird thing that we're going through. And simultaneously is a relative term: it's like the U.S. did theirs in 1998; Canada might do theirs in 2008. But the interesting thing about this is that because it's being run in parallel in so many different places, you can learn lessons from it. You can see what works and what doesn't.

So in America, they've had the new copyright law for the longest, and it's failed completely. Not only has it resulted in no less piracy, which is the nominal reason for it to exist, but it has also led to enormous prosecutions of both individuals and firms, none of which have ever enriched any artists. So what it's done is it's basically provided a perverse incentive for large multinational entertainment companies to sue people, but it's never enriched an artist, right? The copyright law isn't to encourage entertainment giants to sue people; the point of copyright law is to encourage diversity in communication and cultural participation. And we're not getting that out of the American experiment.

Georgia Straight: What does fair use or user rights mean to you?

Cory Doctorow: Most philosophically and broadly, user rights are those things that we call culture that are distinct from the rules that govern commerce. User rights are all those uses that are part of how human beings interact with the information, knowledge, and creativity around them.

The way we understand stuff is by making it. As an award-winning Canadian novelist, I'm here to tell you that my first stories were written by taking books that I liked and ripping them off. There at the age of 12. We call that culture. There isn't a painter who didn't start by repainting the paintings of the painters he loved.”¦

I don't really have a giant problem with a lawyer from a Fortune 100 company at the top of a tower on Bay Street calling another lawyer in a similarly situated tower somewhere in Hollywood and negotiating whether or not they're going to be able to do a new Harry Potter sequel. But I have an enormous problem with copyright law being brought to bear on the kid who makes Harry Potter fan fiction. And I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that the set of rules that governs the interactions between giant corporations shouldn't be the same set of rules that governs the interactions of individuals, private individuals, acting privately.

Copying is no longer an intensely technological act available only to people who own factories. It's now something that we do a million times a day in the privacy of our own homes. And to say that those rules should be the same doesn't make sense. So whether or not Canada gets these rules will be really interesting. Whether or not Canada gets a broad user-rights clause will be really interesting. In France, there was a real effort to make that happen and it ended up getting completely subverted by Vivendi, who, of course, own Universal, so they are a giant entertainment company. Canada lacks the same kind of entertainment giant. We have our Alliance Atlantis and so on, but it's not the same thing.”¦

We enjoy something that the European countries enjoy and the Americans don't, which is a publicly funded broadcaster. So we have a huge universe of publicly funded art produced at taxpayers' expense for taxpayers' enjoyment, and it makes perfect sense for that material to be available on terms that taxpayers want to see it under.”¦

The entertainment industry, by dint of concentrating all power to determine that culture is made and distributed into a few hands, necessarily left a lot of stuff sitting on the ground and ended up not exploring all those diverse ways of creating work and making it available to the public that a really large multiplicity of small players can do by taking individual risks.

Georgia Straight: This is the Long Tail approach.

Cory Doctorow: Yeah, or you could call it the market-economy approach. That we should have competition. That it shouldn't be just one monolithic entity that decides all the stuff you can make. We got copyright as a way of getting past the idea that art was something that you could make if you could find a patron. That if the Pope said you could paint the ceiling, you could paint the ceiling. And when we come back to a world where in order to sample or reuse—which is increasingly bound up in the way that we make art, and I think has always been bound up in the way that we make art—you need permission from one of three or four companies, we're right back to patronage. Patronage is a terrible way to allocate decisions about who gets to make art, who gets to communicate.

Georgia Straight: You are a Trotskyite!

Cory Doctorow: No, no. It's a rare Trotskyite who says “market economy”.

Cory Doctorow delivers The Totalitarian Urge next Thursday (March 8) at 6 p.m. at SFU Harbour Centre (515 West Hastings Street). For free tickets, call 604-291-5100. He gives the lecture again the next day (March 9) at 3:30 p.m. at SFU's Burnaby Campus in the Academic Quadrangle, Room C9001; no reservations. For information, call 778-782-3229.