35 Facts About Cory Doctorow

Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing.

Cory Doctorow is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books.

Cory Efram Doctorow was born in Toronto, Ontario, on 17 July 1971.

Cory Doctorow's paternal grandfather was born in what is Poland and his paternal grandmother was from Leningrad.

Cory Doctorow was a friend of Columbia law professor Tim Wu, dating to their time together in elementary school.

Cory Doctorow went to summer camp as a young teenager at what he has described as a "hippy summer camp" at Grindstone Island, near Portland, Ontario, that was influential on his intellectual life and development.

Cory Doctorow quit high school, received his Ontario Academic Credit from the SEED School in Toronto, and attended four universities without obtaining a degree.

In June 1999, Cory Doctorow co-founded the free software P2P company Opencola with John Henson and Grad Conn, which sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario in the summer of 2003.

Cory Doctorow used a drink called OpenCola as part of its promotional campaign.

Cory Doctorow later relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years, helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before leaving the EFF to pursue writing full-time in January 2006; Cory Doctorow remained a Fellow of the EFF for some time after his departure from the EFF Staff.

Cory Doctorow then returned to London, but remained a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.

In 2009, Cory Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

Cory Doctorow is a Visiting Professor at the Open University in the United Kingdom.

Cory Doctorow married Alice Taylor in October 2008; they have a daughter named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Cory Doctorow, who was born in 2008.

Cory Doctorow became a British citizen by naturalisation on 12 August 2011.

Cory Doctorow left Boing Boing in January 2020, and soon started a solo blogging project titled Pluralistic.

Cory Doctorow's exit was not acknowledged by Boing Boing, with his name being quietly removed from the list of editors on 29 January 2020.

Cory Doctorow served as Canadian Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1999.

On October 31,2005, Cory Doctorow was involved in a controversy concerning digital rights management with Sony-BMG, as told in Wikinomics.

Cory Doctorow was the keynote speaker at the July 2016 Hackers on Planet Earth conference.

Cory Doctorow began selling fiction when he was 17 years old, and sold several stories, followed by publication of the story "Craphound" in 1998.

Cory Doctorow's Sunburst Award-winning short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More was published in 2004: "0wnz0red" from this collection was nominated for the 2004 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

Cory Doctorow released the bestselling novel Little Brother in 2008 with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike licence.

Cory Doctorow released another young adult novel, For the Win, in May 2010.

In September 2012, Cory Doctorow released The Rapture of the Nerds, a novel written in collaboration with Charles Stross.

In February 2013, Cory Doctorow released Homeland, the sequel to his novel Little Brother.

In March 2019, Cory Doctorow released Radicalized, a collection of four self-contained science-fiction novellas dealing with how life in America could be in the near future.

Cory Doctorow's novel called Red Team Blues, a financial thriller about cybersecurity, was released in April 2023.

Cory Doctorow is a contributing writer to Wired magazine, and contributes occasionally to other magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and the Boston Globe.

Cory Doctorow was a contributing writer to the book Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century.

Cory Doctorow believes that copyright laws should be liberalised to allow for free sharing of all digital media.

Cory Doctorow argues that copyright holders should have a monopoly on selling their own digital media and that copyright laws should not be operative unless someone attempts to sell a product that is under someone else's copyright.

Cory Doctorow is an opponent of digital rights management and claims that it limits the free sharing of digital media and frequently causes problems for legitimate users.

Cory Doctorow has criticised the process of the decay in usefulness of online platforms, coining the neologism 'enshittification': "First they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves".

When Cory Doctorow won the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award, the presenters gave him a red cape, goggles and a balloon.