Cory Doctorow is a phony.

Well, it's official: Cory Doctorow is a phony. For all his strident activism against net censorship, he has:

1.) Failed to provide a comments section on his post about his actions vis-a-vis the LeGuin controversy, even though the controversy is heavily involved with Doctorow's favorite issues surrounding copyright, and thus is a natural topic of conversation for the BoingBoing community.

2.) Deleted a number of posts, without explanation, in other comments threads in which people discussed the LeGuin controversy.

3.) When I provided links to a thread here, where people could discuss the LeGuin controversy freely, without hijacking other threads at BoingBoing, he deleted all mention of the Architectonic Architeuthis thread. I have asked for an explanation of his actions, and received none.

Moreover,

4.) Although Doctorow has made a big show of purging BoingBoing of all quotes from LeGuin, he has also allowed an anonymous poster to reproduce, in full, the very same LeGuin essay which started this controversy in the first place. Since anonymous posts at BoingBoing must be approved by a moderator before they become visible, Doctorow has, in effect, once more illegally reproduced LeGuin's essay, while trying to pass the blame to an anonymous accomplice.

The Cory Doctorow Contest

I'd like to announce a new contest:

Find a way to outflank Doctorow's opinions on copyright, by finding a way to use his works- complete with logic-chopping self-justifications- in a way that would be as infuriating to him as his own misuse of LeGuin's work was infuriating to her.

For example: create an ad-free mirror of BoingBoing, with better features, which instantly updates 24/7. Thus, users would rather go to adfreeboingboing.net, and Doctorow would lose ad money. But, since it's a non-commercial use, how can he complain?

Let the contest begin!

The LeGuin / Doctorow controversy

Over at BoingBoing, net activist Cory Doctorow has posted an apology to science fiction author Ursula LeGuin for copying one of her stories, without permission, in its entirety(!) and posting it to BoingBoing, even though he could have easily linked to a legitimate online copy instead. Moreover, he decided to not permit BoingBoing readers to post comments on that blog entry. As a result, a couple of other Boingboing articles are getting hijacked by boingboingers wanting to dicuss the controversy.

I've invited them here to continue the discussion without further hijack, as I think this is an important issue that needs to be discussed. (For that matter, the hijacked articles also involve important issues that need to be discussed- hence my desire to provide a safety valve for the hijacking.)

For the moment, I've turned off comment moderation, so that boingboingers can discuss the controversy in the comments for this post.

Here is LeGuin's story, which Doctorow copied illegally:

http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Note-ChabonAndGenre.html

Here is LeGuin's original letter:

http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Note-OpenLetter.html

Here is the apology which Doctorow ultimately issued:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/14/an-apology-to-ursula.html

Here is the first of the hijacked BoingBoing threads:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/14/lessigs-anticorrupti.html#comments

Here is the second:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/14/congress-dont-crippl.html

Here's a thread at StarShipSofa about Cory Doctorow, including (in more recent posts) the LeGuin controversy:

http://forums.starshipsofa.com/Default.aspx?g=posts&t=162

(As you can see from that last thread, no, I don't like Doctorow. If you have a problem with that, feel free to discuss it in the comments.)