Congratulations to the prolific
Cory Doctorow who fittingly, on Friday last, 8 June 2012, was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Open University.
(Image via
Matt Locke).
Professor Marian Petre made the presentation explaining why Cory had been honoured.
"Cory Doctorow is a science fiction
novelist, blogger and civil rights activist. He is the co-editor of the hugely
popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and is a regular columnist for The
Guardian, Wired, Popular Science, Make, The New York Times, and many other
newspapers, magazines and websites. He was formerly Director of European
Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) and was a founder of
the UK-based Open Rights Group, both non-profit civil liberties organizations
that defend freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. He has
worked at the UN, with standards bodies, governments, industry, universities
and other non-profit organizations promoting a balanced approach to
intellectual property law, a policy area of special educational concern to the
Open University. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg
Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.
His internationally-renowned science
fiction novels are simultaneously published by Tor Books and released on the
Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their re-use and
sharing, a demonstration of his philosophy on open publication. He has won the
Locus and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British
Science Fiction Awards. Entertainment Weekly has called Doctorow "The
William Gibson of his generation."
At a time when technological developments
and associated regulations are transforming our society, including our concepts
of privacy and freedom of expression, Doctorow has been a tireless campaigner
for the free flow of ideas, educating the press, policymakers, OU students and
the general public alike about civil liberties issues related to technology and
intellectual property law.
In IP law in recent years, far removed from
the attention of most ordinary people, there has been a dramatic expansion in
government-granted monopolies over broad swathes of knowledge – patents on
human genes or ways of doing business, repeated extensions of the term of
copyright – which present a clear and present danger to the mission of the Open
University to promote ‘educational opportunity and social justice by providing
high-quality university education to all who wish to realise their ambitions
and fulfil their potential.' Through his campaigning, his writings, his
multitude of accessible and entertaining talks, all freely available on the
Internet, Cory Doctorow has told this complex story, in a way we can all
understand, of the largely successful lobbying of IP industries as they
struggle to protect and extend their knowledge-based monopolies in the face of
developments in technology. His boundless energy and advocacy of innovative
business models and the removal of barriers to achievement does a service, not
just to the OU and the general public, but the entertainment industries
themselves which, even as they succeed in getting more and more draconian
copyright laws and locked-down technologies, continue to experience a shrinking
turnover of their products.
In addition to this wide-ranging
contribution in areas of special educational concern to the OU, Doctorow has
made his specific unique contributions to OU courses like TU100 (My Digital
Life).
Doctorow was named one of Forbes magazine's
2007/8 Web Celebrities, and one of the World Economic Forum's Young Global
Leaders for 2007. Doctorow co-founded the open source peer-to-peer software
company OpenCola, sold to OpenText, Inc in 2003. He serves on the boards and
advisory boards of a variety of cultural and charitable foundations and civil
rights organisations such as the Participatory Culture Foundation, the
MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, Inc, the Organization for Transformative
Works, Areae, the Annenberg Center for the Study of Online Communities, and
Onion Networks, Inc.
In summary, we nominate Cory Doctorow for
an honorary Open University DUni, in recognition of his tireless endeavours and
recognised international standing in areas of special educational concern to
the University – technology law, policy and standards and the free flow of
ideas – and our mission to ‘promote educational opportunity and social justice
by providing high-quality university education to all who wish to realise their
ambitions and fulfil their potential.’"
