Cory Doctorow is European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is author of the novels Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe, both published by Tor, along with Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, forthcoming in Spring 2005, as well as A Place So Foreign and Eight More, published by Four Walls Eight Windows. He is the winner of the 2004 Sunburst Award for Best Canadian Science Fiction Book, a nomination for the 2003 Locus Award in the category of Novella, and the 2000 John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He was also a 2003 Nebula nominee.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom concerns a reputation economy in a future of immortality and no physical need, where ad-hocracies (very similar to SF convention committees) have taken over Walt Disney World as a hobby. Eastern Standard Tribe is about internet tribes based on time zones and involves digital rights management and the choice between smarts and happiness. All are distributed for free under the Creative Commons License, which is to art and literature what the Open Source License is to software. Read them for free! And like me, you might run out and buy them just to vote with your wallet.

The next novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, is a contemporary fantasy novel about open WiFi networking, set in Toronto's Kensington Market. He co-edits the weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net) a popular blog with millions of monthly readers, and is a regular contributor to Wired Magazine, Popular Science, Business 2.0 and other magazines and newspapers. Though he resides in London, UK, Cory is a native Torontonian, and while there, he co-founded OpenCola, an open-source P2P company that was sold last year to Toronto's OpenText, Inc. In addition to software it sold an actual beverage with a public recipe that anyone could make, as an analogy with open source.

Cory has already suggested that we schedule him for a reading, a talk on digital rights management, and panels on 1) the hidden totalitarian assumptions in I, Robot; 2) Folk Art, Fandom and Copyright; and 3) unlimited spectrum and cognitive radio. Plus he's interested in playing the role of Eddie in Penguicon's live Rocky Horror Picture Show.