Little Brother - Credit: craphound.com

The New York Times has named Little Brother one of the eight “Notable Children’s Books of 2008.”  This is undoubtedly the first CC licensed novel to receive this award.

Here’s a Happy Thanksgiving from the New York Times: they’ve named Little Brother one of the eight “Notable Children’s Books of 2008,” calling it, “a novel that is at once an entertaining thriller, a thoughtful polemic and a practical handbook of digital-age self-defense.”

Congrats Cory.

• Craphound
• New York Times

Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow has written an article for the November 2008 issue of Locus Magazine discussing his view on the current state of copyright law.

[C]opyright’s problem is that most of the copyists cheerfully admit that they copy. The majority of American Internet users engage in infringing file-sharing. If file-sharing were stamped out tomorrow, they’d swap the same files — and more — by trading hard drives, or thumb drives, or memory cards (and more data would change hands, albeit more slowly).

Copyists either know that they infringe but don’t care, or they believe that the law can’t possible criminalize what they’re doing and assume that it punishes more egregious forms of copying, such as selling pirate DVDs in the street. In fact, copyright law penalizes selling DVDs at a much lower level than sharing the same movies over the Internet for free, and the risk of buying one of these DVDs is much lower (thanks to the high costs of enforcement against people making transactions in the real world) than the risk of downloading them online.

An interesting article, although a bit on the long side.

• Locus Online
• Slashdot

Little Brother has been featured in a New York Times article

“Little Brother” is a terrific read, but it also claims a place in the tradition of polemical science-fiction novels like “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Fahrenheit 451” (with a dash of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”). It owes a more immediate debt to Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli’s comic book series “DMZ,” about the adventures of a photojournalist in the midst of a new American civil war. … MY favorite thing about “Little Brother” is that every page is charged with an authentic sense of the personal and ethical need for a better relationship to information technology, a visceral sense that one’s continued dignity and independence depend on it: “My technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn’t spying on me. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.”

There have been a lot of CC-related NY Times articles lately. Sweetness.

• Boing Boing
• New York Times

Cory Doctorow has released a collection of essays under CC BY-NC-SA.

Today, Tachyon Books and I are launching my latest book, Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, my very first collection of essays. In it are 28 essays about everything from copyright and DRM to the layout of phone-keypads, the fallacy of the semantic web, the nature of futurism, the necessity of privacy in a digital world, the reason to love Wikipedia, the miracle of fanfic, and many other subjects. The book sports a very fine Introduction by John Perry Barlow, and was designed by typography legend John D Berry.

I really wish he’d use CC BY-SA.

• Craphound

Some of Cory Doctorow’s stories have been adapted into comic book form, and now they have been released as a single collection.

IDW adapted six of my short stories for comic book, publishing them as singles in 2007. In 2008, they published the full collection in a single set of covers, and I released them as a Creative Commons download under the Attribution-ShareAlike-Noncommercial license. Collected in this volume are adaptations of my award-winning stories “Craphound,” “Anda’s Game,” “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” “After the Siege,” “I, Robot” and “Nimby and the D-Hoppers.”

Should I feel bad that I didn’t actually know that he already had comic books out?  I look forward to reading these (but only after I’ve finished the stories they are based off of).

• Craphound