A Blogger Infiltrates Academe

Cory Doctorow has no college degree, just a busy Web site and some provocative views on copyright

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By BROCK READ

Los Angeles

It was on an airplane not quite a decade ago that Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the wildly popular blog Boing Boing, became a copyright crusader. Mr. Doctorow calls the moment his "conversion experience at 30,000 feet."

Chatting with lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, he came to the conclusion that the entire copyright system was badly broken. As the co-founder of a company that sold peer-to-peer software, Mr. Doctorow had tried working within that system. But shortly after his airborne epiphany, he joined the foundation and began to fight for a whole new interpretation of copyright law.

For the next five years, Mr. Doctorow spent a good deal of time on airplanes, flying off to conferences, colloquia, and legal hearings. As the foundation's director of European affairs, he traveled, by his estimation, more than three weeks out of every month.

So when Mr. Doctorow sits on a lonely bench here at the University of Southern California discussing his latest move, a foray into academe, he exudes the nervous energy of someone who is not used to sitting in one place — or, at the least, someone who hardly expected to find himself in this particular place.

Mr. Doctorow has been at the university's Center for Public Diplomacy since last summer, working as a scholar and, for the most part, staying put. This spring he has taken his first stab at life as a lecturer, teaching a graduate-level course in which he guides students through an irreverent history of copyright law.

The visiting professor mentions that he recently invited a representative from Warner Brothers, one of the entertainment companies he often criticizes on his blog, to speak to the class. The industry official's appearance was a dispatch from the other side of what Mr. Doctorow sees as a continuing war over copyright law, digital rights, and the very meaning of intellectual property.

Mr. Doctorow has little taste for what he calls the "maximalist" view of intellectual property — the notion that copyright is something to be enforced strictly rather than something that should strive to be as invisible and as flexible as possible — and the subtitle of his course is meant as a bit of a provocation. "Is everyone on campus a copyright criminal?" the syllabus asks, alluding to the overwhelming majority of college students who have swapped music, movies, and software on peer-to-peer networks. If the answer is yes, he suggests, then something has clearly gone wrong.

With his new course, Mr. Doctorow has joined the growing ranks of scholars preaching that copyright law needs a makeover. Professors like Lawrence Lessig, of Stanford University; Siva Vaidhyanathan, of New York University; and Edward W. Felten, of Princeton University, have taught courses that sought to poke holes in traditional views of copyright. But while those professors made their names in large part through academic books and research projects, Mr. Doctorow has taken a decidedly different route. He doesn't hold a college degree, and he earned his reputation not through scholarly work but through a blog.

Mr. Doctorow has no interest in playing down his role as a blogger who has infiltrated the ranks of academe. Even the name of his course, "Pwned," is a nod to the medium that made his name. A neologism with varying pronunciations coined by online gamers and made popular by bloggers and discussion-board posters, it refers to the act of being thoroughly bested. The theme of domination, Mr. Doctorow argues, is all too appropriate for a branch of law that has favored corporate interests over individual ones.

Mr. Doctorow's supporters at the university say his unorthodox path to academe is an asset, not a cause for concern. "The academy needs to have people come in and redefine the rules, to push the traditional precepts of how things are done," says Joshua S. Fouts, director of the public-diplomacy center, which brought Mr. Doctorow to the campus as its first Canadian Fulbright chair in public diplomacy. "What Cory does here is basically what he does at Boing Boing: He thinks about technology on a global scale."

Tech Start-Up

Mr. Doctorow traces his activist streak to his parents, a pair of Toronto schoolteachers whom he describes as "Trotskyist." But his own career in advocacy got off to a slow start. As a young man he enrolled in four different colleges, including the University of Waterloo and Michigan State University, but he dropped out of each one.

In the late 1990s, he and two friends founded OpenCola, a company that developed a piece of open-source peer-to-peer software. Mr. Doctorow soon found himself hobnobbing with entertainment-industry executives and copyright activists like those at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that has opposed copyright holders in court and in public debate.

Mr. Doctorow had not considered himself militant on matters of copyright, but his encounters with entertainment-industry officials left him jaundiced. "It was clear this wasn't an industry that was working with technology," he says, recalling an afternoon when he watched representatives of one record company trade high-fives after buying out a lesser peer-to-peer firm that they had saddled with lawsuits. "It was only interested in suing technology."

After joining the EFF, Mr. Doctorow was quick to put his money where his mouth was. In 2003 he finished his first science-fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which became the first novel published under Mr. Lessig's nascent Creative Commons license. The license allowed readers to pass the book around freely online, provided they neither made money from it nor used to it to create "derivative works" of their own. (Mr. Doctorow later relaxed his stance on derivative works and amended the license.)

But Mr. Doctorow's most influential role came as a writer and editor of Boing Boing — a job that started, he says, as something of a happy accident.

Boing Boing began life in the late 1980s as a print publication that billed itself as "the world's greatest neurozine." The print edition faded away, but in 2000 its founder, Mark Frauenfelder, recast the project as a one-man blog. Mr. Doctorow started writing for the site early the next year.

At first Boing Boing was content trying to live up to its subtitle: "a directory of wonderful things." In short, unceremonious posts, Mr. Frauenfelder and Mr. Doctorow charted the Web's blossoming at the turn of the century, dispensing links to sites they found clever and articles they deemed worthy.

But the blog got its big break when a post rounding up theories on the closely guarded identity of a much-hyped invention called "IT" made it onto CNN. The invention — which turned out to be the Segway scooter — was something of an anticlimax. But Boing Boing's popularity snowballed, and it is still increasing steadily. The site regularly tops a list of the Web's most popular blogs kept by Technorati, an online monitoring service. (Technorati reports that more than 20,000 other blogs have linked to posts on Boing Boing in the past three months.)

The site now has four contributing editors, but Mr. Doctorow remains its most passionate commentator on policy issues. He posts frequently about copyright law, intellectual property, and digital-rights management, and his condemnations of "maximalist" copyright holders are acid-tongued. When Sony was caught selling music CD's that surreptitiously installed software on users' computers, he accused company executives of "jaw-dropping contempt for their customers."

A Fertile Field

The site has turned Mr. Doctorow into an influential figure in the copyright wars, but he says Boing Boing is as much a scratchpad as it is a soapbox. "I use it to keep a running track of stuff that seems to be pieces of the puzzle," he says. "Most of the pieces are just blue sky, but every now and again you find a corner."

That philosophy carries over to Mr. Doctorow's course at the University of Southern California. Intellectual property is, at the moment, a fertile field of study. Almost every day, it seems, has its breaking-news story: Viacom sues YouTube for copyright infringement. The recording industry sues college students for music piracy. Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, waxes hopeful about a world without digital-rights-management tools.

Mr. Doctorow requires students to sift through such stories and write about them on a class blog (http://uscpwned.blogspot.com) that, stylistically and philosophically, could be Boing Boing's wonkier little brother. By class-project standards, the blog is robust and readable, and for good reason. Students are not just writing for Mr. Doctorow but also to impress each other: At the beginning of each weekly class session, student bloggers run through their recent posts and lead a free-form discussion of current events in copyright.

Students also edit articles on Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia, of which Mr. Doctorow is quite fond. Many professors try desperately to steer their students away from the site, but Mr. Doctorow has required students in "Pwned" to browse Wikipedia in search of articles on copyright and technology that could use improvement.

In the meantime, Mr. Doctorow uses his weekly lectures to cover the history of intellectual property "from Augustus Caesar to Alan Turing," as the course syllabus puts it. Like Mr. Lessig and Mr. Vaidhyanathan, he speaks of a longstanding battle between corporations — who, in his eyes, typically use copyright as a cudgel to support their financial interests — and consumers, who rely on copyright to preserve their own stake in the process of cultural production.

In Mr. Doctorow's view, copyright law should strive to preserve people's freedom to consume works as they see fit, and it should encourage consumers to adapt copyrighted works so long as they are not making money off the result. "What readers do with their own equipment, as private, noncommercial actors, is not a fit subject for copyright regulation or oversight," he wrote in an essay published last year.

So Mr. Doctorow advocates licensing schemes, like Creative Commons, that let copyright holders authorize noncommercial uses of their work. And he argues that fair-use doctrine should be interpreted liberally.

A Different View

What Mr. Doctorow tells his 17 students about copyright is strikingly different from the official position that the rest of USC's thousands of students hear.

In August university officials sent an e-mail message to undergraduates, warning them that the university — and, possibly, the recording industry — would punish them for file-sharing infractions. To Mr. Doctorow the letter was a sign that the university was failing to educate students about the underpinnings of intellectual-property law.

So the visiting professor made his own sharply critical annotations to the message and posted them online. Showing a flair for drama, he called one statement made in the letter — a claim that "as an academic institution, USC's purpose is to promote and foster the creation and lawful use of intellectual property" — "the single most shocking thing I have ever read from a university."

"The purpose of a university is to promote learning and scholarship," he wrote. "To say otherwise is just jaw-dropping."

Mr. Doctorow says no one from the university ever contacted him to complain about the annotation. (Campus officials say they did not send the letter out again this semester.) But if administrators had registered objections, Mr. Doctorow would not have listened too closely. His fellowship at USC ends in the spring, and he says he is glad to be unconcerned with tenure and other issues full-time professors face. "I'm not a career academic, so none of that stuff matters to me," he says.

That also means Mr. Doctorow can devote his time away from the classroom to writing for Boing Boing, and to his science-fiction novels (he has now published three, along with two collections of short fiction), even though that kind of work would not be much help in a tenure review. He views the university, it seems, with a sort of detached bemusement.

Gray Areas

Of course, bemusement can work both ways. Mr. Doctorow says some students have had difficulty persuading their academic advisers that a course on copyright law — especially one with a title like "Pwned" — is a worthy elective.

Mr. Doctorow's course might be a hard sell to vocation-minded advisers, but it has managed to attract students from a broad swath of disciplines. The course's enrollees include students in pre-law and sports management, students who see themselves as budding activists, students who plan to start record labels, and one who told Mr. Doctorow he joined the course simply because he had downloaded a lot of music illegally.

Mr. Doctorow says his goal is not to train a generation of "copyleft" advocates but rather to give students the sense that intellectual property is, at the very least, a field with plenty of gray areas.

"There's a pre-law kid in the class who wants to be a lawyer for video-game companies," he says, pointing out that the gaming industry has a much stricter take on copyright than groups like the EFF would advocate. "I would prefer for that kid to do progressive things in his job than for him to have a one-sided, maximalist view of copyright."

There are times when he can't help but engage in a bit of Boing Boing-style rabble-rousing — as when he pauses to consider USC's "free-speech zone." The university established the zone to keep student protesters from spreading out across the campus, and it is clear that Mr. Doctorow is unimpressed with the idea. He is especially upset that the student-run Free Culture club, which he advises, was fined for posting flyers elsewhere on the campus, informing readers that they were not standing in a free-speech zone.

Today he decides to wander over to the zone and try to get a sense of what kinds of speech are allowed only within its borders. A security officer tells him the zone is for large gatherings and speakers using megaphones, but another campus official gives him a different interpretation: Any speech accompanied by props that could be dangerous, like picket signs, must be restricted to the zone, the official says. Mr. Doctorow presses forward with a series of increasingly absurdist questions — Do balloons count as dangerous props? What about costumes? — and then he leaves, smiling as he shakes his head.