Cory Doctorow

Cory Efram Doctorow (ˈkɒri_ˈdɒktəroʊ; born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, , and post-scarcity economics. Cory Efram Doctorow was born in Toronto, Ontario, on 17 July 1971. He is of Eastern European Jewish descent. His paternal grandfather was born in what is now Poland and his paternal grandmother was from Leningrad. Both fled Nazi Germany's advance eastward during World War II, and as a result Doctorow's father was born in a displaced persons camp near Baku, Azerbaijan. His grandparents and father emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union. Doctorow's mother's family were Ukrainian-Russian Romanians. Doctorow was a friend of Columbia law professor Tim Wu, dating to their time together in elementary school. Doctorow went to summer camp as a young teenager at what he has described as a "hippy summer camp" at Grindstone Island, near Portland, Ontario, that was influential on his intellectual life and development. He quit high school, received his Ontario Academic Credit (high school diploma) from the SEED School in Toronto, and attended four universities without obtaining a degree. Cory Doctorow has stated both that he is not related to the American novelist E. L. Doctorow and that he may be a third cousin once removed of the novelist. In June 1999, Doctorow co-founded the free software P2P company Opencola with John Henson and Grad Conn, which sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario in the summer of 2003. The company used a drink called OpenCola as part of its promotional campaign. Doctorow later relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years, helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before leaving the EFF to pursue writing full-time in January 2006; Doctorow remained a Fellow of the EFF for some time after his departure from the EFF Staff.