Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (pdf document) download at fliiby.com

"Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/1 Little Brother Cory Doctorow READ THIS FIRST This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercialShareAlike 3.0 license. That means: doctorow@craphound.com I wrote Little Brother in a whitehot fury between May 7, 2007 and July 2, 2007: exactly eight weeks from the day I thought it up to the day I finished it (Alice, to whom this book is dedicated, had to put up with me clacking out the final chapter at 5AM in our hotel in Rome, where we were celebrating our anniversary). I'd always dreamed of having a book just materialize, fully formed, and come pouring out of my fingertips, no sweat and fuss but it wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd thought it would be. There were days when I wrote 10,000 words, hunching over my keyboard in airports, on subways, in taxis anywhere I could type. The book was trying to get out of my head, no matter what, and I missed so much sleep and so many meals that friends started to ask if I was unwell. When my dad was a young university student in the 1960s, he was one of the few "counterculture" people who thought computers were a good thing. For most young people, computers represented the dehumanization of society. University students were reduced to numbers on a punchcard, each bearing the legend "DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE," prompting some of the students to wear pins that said, "I AM A STUDENT: DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE ME." Computers were seen as a means to increase the ability of the authorities to regiment people and bend them to their will. You are free:   to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work to Remix — to adapt the work Under the following conditions:  When I was a 17, the world seemed like it was just going to get more free. The Berlin Wall was about to come down. Computers  Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial which had been geeky and weird a few years before were purposes. everywhere, and the modem I'd used to connect to local bulletin board systems was now connecting me to the entire world through  Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, the Internet and commercial online services like GEnie. My you may distribute the resulting work only under the same lifelong fascination with activist causes went into overdrive as I or similar license to this one. saw how the main difficulty in activism organizing was getting easier by leaps and bounds (I still remember the first time  For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others I switched from mailing out a newsletter with handwritten the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is addresses to using a database with mailmerge). In the Soviet with a link http://craphound.com/littlebrother Union, communications tools were being used to bring information and revolution to the farthestflung corners of  Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my the largest authoritarian state the Earth had ever seen. permission But 17 years later, things are very different. The computers I love are being coopted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us. The National Security Agency has illegally wiretapped the entire USA and gotten away with it. Car rental companies and mass transit and traffic authorities are watching where we go, sending us automated tickets, finking us out to busybodies, cops and bad guys who gain illicit access to their databases. The Transport Security Administration maintains a "nofly" list of people who'd never been convicted of any crime, but who are Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). More info here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/byncsa/3.0/ See the end of this file for the complete legalese. INTRODUCTION Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/2 nevertheless considered too dangerous to fly. The list's contents are secret. The rule that makes it enforceable is secret. The criteria for being added to the list are secret. It has fouryearolds on it. And US senators. And decorated veterans actual war heroes. The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a computer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically depriving them of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood. What's more, kids were clearly being used as guineapigs for a new kind of technological state that all of us were on our way to, a world where taking a picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museum or even a Starbucks), or terrorism (in a public place), but where we could be photographed, tracked and logged hundreds of times a day by every tinpot dictator, cop, bureaucrat and shopkeeper. A world where any measure, including torture, could be justified just by waving your hands and shouting "Terrorism! 9/11! Terrorism!" until all dissent fell silent. We don't have to go down that road. If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose webbrowsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them around. If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech not censorship then you have a dog in the fight. If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tell us the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the same struggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under the same Bill of Rights that adults have. You can build a lot of it. You can share it and remix it (see THE COPYRIGHT THING, below). You can use the ideas to spark important discussions with your friends and family. You can use those ideas to defeat censorship and get onto the free Internet, even if your government, employer or school doesn't want you to. Making stuff: The folks at Instructables have put up some killer HOWTOs for building the technology in this book. It's easy and incredibly fun. There's nothing so rewarding in this world as making stuff, especially stuff that makes you more free: http://www.instructables.com/member/w1n5t0n/ Discussions: There's an educator's manual for this book that my publisher, Tor, has put together that has tons of ideas for classroom, reading group and home discussions of the ideas in it: http://www.tor forge.com/static/Little_Brother_Readers_Guide.pdf Defeat censorship: The afterword for this book has lots of resources for increasing your online freedom, blocking the snoops and evading the censorware blocks. The more people who know about this stuff, the better. Your stories: I'm collecting stories of people who've used technology to get the upper hand when confronted with abusive authority. I'm going to be including the best of these in a special afterword to the UK edition (see below) of the book, and I'll be putting them online as well. Send me your stories at doctorow@craphound.com, with the subject line "Abuses of Authority". GREAT BRITAIN I'm a Canadian, and I've lived in lots of places (including San Francisco, the setting for Little Brother), and now I live in London, England, with my wife Alice and our little daughter, Poesy. I've lived here (off and on) for five years now, and though I love it to tiny pieces, there's one thing that's always bugged me: This book is meant to be part of the conversation about what an my books aren't available here. Some stores carried them as information society means: does it mean total control, or unheard special items, imported from the USA, but it wasn't published by of liberty? It's not just a noun, it's a verb, it's something you do. a British publisher. That's changed! HarperCollins UK has bought the British rights to this book (along with my next young adult novel, FOR THE WIN), and they're publishing it just a few months after the US edition, on November 17, 2008 (the day after I get back from my honeymoon!). DO SOMETHING This book is meant to be something you do, not just something you read. The technology in this book is either real or nearly real. Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/3 I'm so glad about this, I could bust, honestly. Not just because "DRM" (Digital Rights Management) systems intended they're finally selling my books in my adopted homeland, but to control use and copying. That means that you won't find this book on Audible or iTunes, because Audible because I'm raising a daughter here, dammit, and the surveillance refuses to sell books without DRM (even if the author and control mania in this country is starting to scare me and publisher don't want DRM), and iTunes only carries bloodless. It seems like the entire police and governance system Audible audiobooks. However, you can buy the MP3 file in Britain has fallen in love with DNAswabbing, fingerprinting direct from RandomHouse or many other fine etailers, and videorecording everyone, on the off chance that someday or through this widget: you might do something wrong. In early 2008, the head of http://www.zipidee.com/zipidAudioPreview.aspx? Scotland Yard seriously proposed taking DNA from fiveyear aid=c5a8e946fd2c4b9ea748f297bba17de8 olds who display "offending traits" because they'll probably grow up to be criminals. The next week, the London police put up My foreign rights agent, Danny Baror, has presold a number of posters asking us all to turn in people who seem to be taking foreign editions: pictures of the ubiquitous CCTV spycameras because anyone who pays too much attention to the surveillance machine is  Greece: Pataki probably a terrorist. America isn't the only country that lost its mind this decade. Britain's right there in the nuthouse with it, dribbling down its shirt front and pointing its finger at the invisible bogeymen and screaming until it gets its meds. We need to be having this conversation all over the planet. Like I said, the UK edition goes on sale on November 17 (ISBN: 9780007288427). There'll even be a limited edition, signed hardcover for people who like their books all artifacty. If you want to be notified when the book goes on sale, just drop me an email at doctorow@craphound.com with the subject line LITTLE BROTHER UK EDITION.    Russia: AST Publishing France: Universe Poche Norway: Det Norske Samlaget No publication dates yet for these, but I'll keep updating this file as more information is available. You can also subscribe to my mailing list for more info. THE COPYRIGHT THING The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much. I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these negotiations even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of Little Brother (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for fiction), that's still only a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage. I hate the fact that fans who want to do what readers have OTHER EDITIONS My agent, Russell Galen (and his subagent Danny Baror) did an amazing job of preselling rights to Little Brother in many languages and formats. Here's the list as of today (May 4, 2008). I'll be updating it as more editions are sold, so feel free to grab another copy of this file (http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download) if there's an edition you're hoping to see, or see http://craphound.com/littlebrother/buy/ for links to buy all the currently shipping editions.  Audiobook from Random House: http://www.randomhouse.com/audio/littlebrotheraudiobo ok A condition of my deal with Random House is that they're not allowed to release this on services that use Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/4 always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. It's just stupid to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a license to do so. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing. 10,000 of them in storage lockers in London, Los Angeles and Toronto. If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, I would. The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place. It's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to reconsider their business models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky, but let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches! I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing. there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to In case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy tshirts with away ebooks makes sense at this time and place: their bookcovers on them. I'm a customer for life. Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money? books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without For me for pretty much every writer the big problem isn't permission is that they're readers, they're people who love books. piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, People who study the habits of musicbuyers have discovered the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest someone gave them a free copy. Megahit bestsellers in science spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're fiction sell half a million copies in a world where 175,000 one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on attend the San Diego Comic Con alone, you've got to figure that the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. most of the people who "like science fiction" (and related geeky stuff like comics, games, Linux, and so on) just don't really buy If you're a member of the redhot musicfan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower books. I'm more interested in getting more of that wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who's in the tent to paying for blackmarket vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern bought a ticket to be there. European covers of your favorite deathmetal band. Same with books. I've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. I've hung out in pirate ebook ("bookwarez") places online. I..."

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