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My novel Pirate Cinema is the current TechDirt Book Club selection, and we're kicking it off today with a Google+ hangout in about five minutes. I've never done a Hangout before -- I don't have a G+ account because I object to its "real names" policy, but I've created a throwaway account for the occasion.

Live Video: Cory Doctorow Talking With Techdirt About Pirate Cinema, Copyright Law & More

In this edition of the Big Idea, author Chandler Klang Smith confronts reality, the imaginary, perception, and, of course, Bob Dylan, whilst discussing her novel Goldenland Past Dark. Good morning! Hope you’ve had your coffee. CHANDLER KLANG SMITH: When one sees reality through the mind’s eye, what is created?  And what is erased, distorted, lost? [...]

Various news organizations, CNN and Fox most notably, have been catching all sorts of crap on my Twitter and Facebook feeds for being unduly handwringing about the fate of the two Ohio teenage boys who raped a drunk and unconscious girl and then found themselves found guilty (actually “delinquent,” which is the juvenile crimes version [...]

Last fall, while on the Pirate Cinema tour, I stopped in at the Library of Congress to give a talk called "A Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond," which was an amazing treat. The LoC people were delightful and the building and its collections were outstanding. Now, they've put the video online!

A Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond

Tuesday! We greet you again in all your second-day-of-the-work-week-ness! And with a new episode of The Human Division: “This Must Be the Place.” Let’s find out what it’s about: Colonial Union diplomat Hart Schmidt is back home for Harvest Day celebrations—to a family whose members wonder whether its youngest son isn’t wasting his life clinging [...]

As I mentioned in my March Locus column, I'm celebrating the tenth anniversary of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by planning a prequel volume. As part of that planning, I'm going to read aloud the entire text of that first book into my podcast, making notes on the book as I go. Here's part one.

Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com

John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting livingproofbrewcast.com. In his free time he makes "Beer Jewelry" and "Odd Musical Furniture." He often "meditates while reading cookbooks."

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The computer on the right is the Toshiba Satellite I purchased in 2007 in the middle of my book tour, because the laptop I  had been carrying along with me died and I need something to replace it with, and the Toshiba seemed like a look choice at the time. And it was; your basic [...]

As you can see the Gamma Rabbit t-shirts have begun to ship, so if you ordered one, if you don’t have it now, you’ll have it soon. As I am wearing one even as I type this, I can assure that the t-shirt is indeed of high quality, and the graphic is a hell of [...]

Hey, Londoners! A quick reminder that I'll be signing the new UK edition of Rapture of the Nerds this Saturday at Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Ave at 13h. Come on down and say hi!

Thomas "Command Line" Gideon came out for the DC stop on my Homeland tour, at Busboys and Poets, and mic'ed me up for the event. He's mastered the audio and posted it. It's a 40 minute talk about the promise of technology to improve our lives, the risks from allowing technology to be used to surveil and control us, and the contributions Aaron Swartz made to this cause and to the book. There's also about 20 minutes of Q&A.

TCLP 2013-03-13 Cory Doctorow on the Themes of “Homeland”

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Engadget has a liveblogging of my panel with Veronica Belmont and Daniel Wilson (with Engadget’s Tim Stevens moderating) and it’s available here. It was a fun panel to be on; Veronica and Daniel were great co-panelists and we bounced a lot of ideas of each other. I assume at some point Engadget will put up [...]

I haven't said much political in a while. Moreover, amid all the talk of budget balancing and sequesters, I'd like to shift attention to a topic that may - at first sight - seem a bit wonkish and detached: farm subsidies.  In fact, they are an area where Blue America remains frightfully ignorant and where the flood of entitlement spending merits closer attention, in times of near bankruptcy.

Are we entering an new era of negotiation?
Amid the flux of rapid change, new alliances and alignments are being made, as we speak.   Some conservative pastors are reversing what had been standard dogma, speaking out for "creation-tending" and action on climate change. Meanwhile, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups are cautiously easing (even in the wake of Fukushima) their once-rigid opposition toward nuclear power. While Barack Obama and the democrats show flexibility toward cautious offshore drilling, a few Republican legislators showed a willingness to pursue more stringent gas mileage standards and cap-and-trade methods for curbing greenhouse gases.
Of course, in some of these cases, what we're seeing is another example of "leaders" following the public, rather than the other way around.  Still, after the century's first decade (the Nasty Oughts) featured intransigent Culture War,  is it possible we are witnessing a gradual return to the other, classic American pattern?  That of even-tempered pragmatism? Finally shaking off a bad case of Future Shock that swept America, along with that fearsome "2" in the millennium column.  I guess we'll find out, if (as predicted by my friend, the renowned business pundit John Mauldin) Democrats and republicans astonish everyone with a sensible compromise budget deal.
If so, it has to be only the beginning. After immigration reform and modest sensibility on assault weapons, there are some other sticky matters badly in need of a fresh look.
(Note: this posting is an updating of a "classic" that got a lot of buzz some years ago.)
The History and Common Sense of Farm Subsidies... and What Happened
Let's zero in on one area where logic and pragmatism have been in short supply -- the question of farm subsidies, and how they lately spurred a giant biofuels industry -- one that could have been set up sensibly, but for the simplemindedness of all sides, leaving in place little more than a wasteful scam.
First a little history, of the biblical kind. Remember Joseph? He of the technicolor coat, who wandered into Egypt and interpreted a Pharaoh's dream? Seven fat cows, followed by seven skinny ones.  These, Joseph announced, forecast a time of bumper harvests, followed by one of devastating famine. That is, unless sufficient stocks were bought and stored away. Which the forewarned Pharaoh did, whereupon he ultimately thanked Joseph for saving the nation.
Historians now verify that the Egyptian state used to do this sort of thing often, in a routine and simple way. Whenever crops grew abundant and grain prices were low, the government bought and stored grain, both assisting farmers hit by low prices and creating a stockpiled reserve. When supplies ran thin and prices ran high, the caches were opened and stores sold, softening price swings, letting both farmers and consumers have a little predictability in life. Any resulting profit to the government helped to maintain to the granaries. A simple system. Everyone benefited. Farmers weren't bankrupted by too-good harvest years. The people weren't starved and taken advantage of in lean times. Taxpayers got their money's worth. The state's useful role paid for itself.
Now, there were a few special circumstances that helped Pharoanic Egypt master this trick. The dry climate allowed grain storage for extended periods. Also, there are a few things that simple-minded kingdoms do really well, such as repeating the same working pattern, over and over. Pivotally, those ancient farmers did not have a powerful voting bloc, able to sway government policy and alter the arrangement in shortsighted ways -- a failure mode of later, more sophisticated nations.
Take the U.S. Great Depression, a time when urban populations went hungry, while farmers poured excess milk into sewers, because the price was too low to be worth shipping. Under the New Deal, various methods were tried, for helping rural populations hard beset by market ructions... as well as dust bowls, foreclosures, bank failures, disease and bad land mismanagement. Some of the solutions -- e.g. roads, schools, electrification, farm-science and thousands of farm bureau offices, subsidized post, phone and internet -- seem proper tasks for government, even from a conservative perspective. (Now, that is; though all of these sensible measures were bitterly fought by the same shortsighted folks who today equate FDR with Satan.)
Notably, urban taxpayers never demanded payback for a cent of all that rural infrastructural support -- a tradition that continues today, as rivers of tax dollars continue to flow from Blue to Red. Nor should they. (Nor should rural folk brag about how "independent" they are.) We need each other. E pluribus unum.
How did Farm Policy Leave Common Sense Behind?
Infrastructure is an easy decision, but how to damp those pesky swings in market price? Of course, a direct approach for achieving rural assistance, and one that involves the most market-meddling, has been direct farm subsidy payments and price supports. And, way back in the 1930s, the first recourse looked pretty darn traditional. The government simply bought up extra food and gave it to poor people. Some of the grain and milk got turned into storable items, like flour and cheese, to serve as a national reserve before getting recycled through food stamps and school lunch programs. And, yes, the government bought grains when they were cheap and sold them later, when the price was high. All very logical. Almost Egyptian.
Only progress follows progress. With all that education and infrastructure and investment, farmers got a whole lot better at their business. There came a time when US agriculturalists could not be stopped from producing too much! Domestically, at least, there was no longer a "famine" side of the cycle, for the government to dump its stockpiles into. And sure, the government tried making this a win-win by sending massive amounts of food overseas, as foreign aid. But, while some of this was genuinely life-saving, we now know that another result was -- just as often -- to undermine local agricultural systems and wreck a developing nation's ability to feed itself. Beware of unforeseen consequences.
So the idea arose simply to pay farmers not to produce on some of their land. On occasion this has been done, in some countries, by purchasing some of the farmland outright, leaving it fallow or converting it to other uses, even parks. Farmers benefit from higher prices or collateral value for their land. Farmers also get higher income from their crops, since less land is in production overall. And taxpayers get something tangible, in return for this help. They get that land. It can be banked, just like that Egyptian grain. Only much better-preserved and with ecological benefits, too,
But then, we are a nation where political power was deliberately tilted, from the beginning, toward rural states. And, as one might expect, there came pressure for change. It began to occur to clever people that governments can be arm-twisted into giving, without getting anything in return. (After all, look at the dams and highways and schools.) So, polemical tricks were used. For government to buy land and surplus produce was "socialistic." On the other hand, simply paying farmers to keep their land, but not to grow anything on it, well, that somehow made sense and was not socialistic at all!
This is an old, old argument, and I am neither qualified, nor interested in getting down to the actual fight over farm supports, per se. Or the way giant agribusinesses now collect the lion's share of subsidies that were designed to preserve family farms. Or the way opponents of socialism nevertheless have managed to rationalize demanding that the taxpayers' government never get anything direct and tangible, in return! (Socializing and externalizing costs while privatizing profits -- that's the new version of "capitalism." And Adam Smith is spinning in his grave.)
Only let's get back to Joseph; note how the second half of the ancient cycle is now almost completely missing. When the government used to stabilize low prices by buying something material (grain or land) it acquired a palpable reserve that it could then use in emergencies, or sell when prices were high. But, today, there are no large federal stocks of food pouring forth to ease the skyrocketing supermarket prices, nor stocks of reserved land being nurtured in fallow-recovery, or else offered to young, suburban couples to try their hand, as new farming pioneers. Nor are the direct-payment subsidies being cut back, now that floods of profit are pouring into agribusiness.
It is no longer a matter of cycle balancing. It is an entitlement.  Indeed, one sees some very "non-egyptian" things going on... like a US government hurrying to fill the National Strategic Petroleum Reserve with high priced oil. The same government that (does anybody at all recall?) sold out of the reserve, years ago, when prices were low.  Buy high and sell low.  Very "non-egyptian," indeed.
(Note, that particular scandal happened under the George W. Bush Administration, when this article first posted. Nor was it alone.  The Bushes sold off most of the US helium reserve - to friends at low prices - and now a helium scarcity is growing dire. We all need to become better at detecting such scams.)
What Does Any Of This Have To Do With Biofeuls And Ethanol?
Good question. First, some more historical perspective, provided (in 2008) by economic analyst John Mauldin:
"North America has experienced great weather for the last 18 consecutive years, which, combined with other improvements in agriculture, has resulted in abundant crops. According to Donald Coxe, chief strategist of Harris Investment Management , you have to go back 800 years to find a period of such favorable weather for so long a time. Yet food stocks in corn, wheat, rice, etc. are dangerously low. We are just one bad weather season from a potential worldwide food disaster. And Dennis Gartman has been pointing out almost daily how far behind US farmers are in getting their corn crops planted, due to bad weather:" Further. “… the corn crop really is behind schedule. Corn is not like wheat. Wheat can survive drought; it can survive cold; wheat, as we were taught by our mentor, Mr. Melvin Ford, many years ago, is a weed. It is an amazing, resilient plant. But corn is temperamental; it needs rain when it needs rain; it needs dry conditions when it needs dry conditions. It needs to not be hit by early season frost, or it will suffer, and it needs a rather archly set number of days to grow. Each day lost at the front end of the planting/growing season puts pressure upon the corn plant to finish its job before the autumn frosts, and puts increased soybean acreage and decreased corn acreage before us. Meanwhile, ranchers are reducing their herds, as they cannot afford to feed them due to high grain prices.The same thing is happening with chickens. This means sometime this fall supplies of meat of all types are going to be reduced. Maybe someone will point out that using corn to produce ethanol has the unwanted and unintended consequence of driving up food prices all over the world."
As usual, economic wisdom from one of the best analysts in our generation. (Note that in the years since, our US grain belt has been struck by a devastating, multi-year drought.)
So, then, let's bring in ethanol.
In recent years, a heavy and generous federal subsidy has created a vast corn-to-ethanol industry whose effects are causing a lot of public debate. Environmentalists claim that it takes more than a gallon of imported oil to actually create a gallon of ethanol fuel. The greenhouse gas benefits are negligible and possibly negative. According to Mauldin, the price and energy balance would be much better if we imported Brazillian sugar cane, which seems made for ethanol production. But farmers in Idaho apparently have a veto over anything sensible like that.
Of course, never mind the blatant silliness of pouring food into our gas tanks, while poor people around the world riot over skyrocketing prices and we, here, feel a sharp pinch in the store.  Clearly, we are witnessing democracy at its almost-worst. (Wherein hypocritical oligarchs who keep citing the infamous "largesse" diss upon the common citizen, are by far the worst offenders.)
Today, the special interests are vast and well-entrenched, so don't expect them to enter into negotiations to find a logical way out of this mess. Indignant rationalizations abound, and every person seems convinced that their own version of government-suckling is not socialism. It is patriotism.

The Right Way to Apply Hard Liquor...
But now I plan to surprise you. I will speak up not only for government price intervention to help farmers, but also for subsidized biofuel alcohol!
Though not as it is being done today.
Perhaps it is time to take a look back at the Egyptians of old, and go back to the root of the problem, so to speak. Farmers (especially giant agribusinesses) do not deserve automatic subsidies as some kind of birthright. On the other hand, the ancients were onto something. We are all better off if farmers are cushioned from wild market swings and get the kind of predictability that can let them invest in what is, after all, a business vital to us all.
Back when the New Dealers and Great Society folks tried to balance the cycles by buying cheap-excess bumper crops and storing for lean days, they ran into a problem. A vast, continental nation can only store up so much grain and cheese. In part, the move to simple cash grants came out of despair over how to do the job effectively, the Egyptian way.
But here is where alcohol comes in! Because alcohol can be stored.
In fact, it can be stocked away indefinitely, cheaply and beautifully.What was done poorly under Lyndon Johnson... turning excess farm production into mountains of wasted cheese... can now be accomplished logically and efficiently.... if we make biofuel ethanol a seasonal or occasional way to absorb and store, and later use, surges in excess grain production.
What should we do?  Let the ethanol subsidy go away. It is an insane market interference, choosing a market winner and a dumb one, at that.The money could be far better used making up for years of deliberately-sabotaged research into energy independence. Stop the gasohol mandate now!  But don't shut down the gasohol plants completely.
Instead, let the taxpayers buy excess corn whenever its price is worrisomely low, convert the surplus into storable form, and sell the alcohol later, when the price seems right. That is the exact equivalent of the Pharaoh's storehouse. And let the government's profit go to maintaining this reserve capacity, when it is un-needed. 
We need to stop thinking of ethanol as an alternative to imported oil. That's just silly and a crutch for those diverting us from real solutions for energy independence. Nevertheless, ethanol can be viewed as a wonderful way to store the excess produce of America's fertile fields, in a form that will be easily convertible, at some future date, into fuel or money... and thus even back into food.
And yes, chuckle at the image that is brought to mind.  Nearly all of the American founders - especially George Washington - distilled their own moonshine. It often served as cash and currency for farmers, when money was scarce. Alcohol flows through our national blood, in a sense.  And if we view it properly, it can answer the modernized Riddle of Joseph, offering a way to damp the waste of fat years and help us prepare for the lean one that will surely come.. . ...a collaborative contrarian product of David Brin, Enlightenment Civilization, obstinate human nature... and http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ (site feed URL: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/atom.xml)

This is my Bag of Travelin’, and the moment this goes up I am (hopefully) in an airplane, flying over Nebraska or Kansas or some such state, on my way to San Francisco and the Engadget Expand conference. I’m going to be busy most of the weekend, at the conference and/or hanging with friends, so [...]

IP lawyer Stuart Langley wrote a fantastic analysis of the legal issues raised in my novel Pirate Cinema a guest-article for the wonderful Law and the Multiverse site. Langley does a very thorough job of looking at the real laws and legal problems behind the plot points in the book.

The McCauley’s internet access has been disconnected consistently with what appears to be an implementation of the United Kingdom Digital Economy Act 2010. Implementation of this act has been slow, but is expected to lead to notices and service disruption as early as 2014. The implementing code of this act obligates ISPs to respond to copyright infringement reports by notice to subscribers, maintain a list of subscribers that have received notices which can be disclosed to copyright owners under court order, and degrade or deny service to repeat offenders. The technical measures imposed by the law will be appealable; on paper the appeal processes appear designed to protect subscribers, however, the regulations on the appeal process have not yet been published. This foundational scenario in Pirate Cinema is plausible.

But whether it is acceptable to cut off internet access as punishment for violating how that service is used is another question. Because of the disconnection Trent’s father cannot find work, his mother cannot find medical care, and his sister’s schooling suffers. Is internet access is a public utility that should be more difficult to disconnect than summary and unilateral administrative action? As explained in Jim Rossi’s article Universal Service in Competitive Retail Electric Power Markets: Whither the Duty to Serve? 21 Energy L.J. 27 (2000), common law principles express a public utility having a higher obligation to provide service—to provide extraordinary levels of service, especially to small residential customers. These obligations include the duty to extend service, provide continuing reliable service, provide advanced notice of disconnection and to continue service even though a customer cannot make full payment. Public utilities can have terms of service and can terminate service for violations, commonly payment and safety related transgressions. One U.S. city proposed to cut off utility service for failure to pay speeding tickets, although using utility service as a tool to enforce other regulations seems very unusual and inconsistent with the common law “duty to serve”. The question posed by Pirate Cinema is timely as governments try to regulate internet access, they do so by treating it as a public utility. This will be a double edged sword in that one treated as a utility, society should, perhaps, have a higher duty to provide internet access and similarly higher barriers before disconnecting service, including greater due process and evidentiary protections for subscribers.

Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow

We all have ethical perspectives, but what happens when a writer tries to get inside the head of someone with a, shall we say, truly unique take on the ethical responsibilities of the human race? Deb Taber, author of Necessary Ill, may have an insight into this particular trick. DEB TABER: Survival is an instinct. [...]

Some stuff I don’t wanna break into their own posts: * Google Reader is getting the ax, to the wailing and howling of nerds everywhere, including me, because I use it and like it because it’s simple to use, displays what I want to read via RSS how I want to read it, and otherwise [...]

No, not the Mallet pictured above. That’s mine. BUT: The Mallet of Loving Correction, my hardcover collection of Whatever posts from 2008 through 2012, is now available for pre-order at the Subterranean Press Web site. This is is a huge collection — nearly 500 pages — and it’s going to be a limited (1,500) edition. [...]

Damien Walter's written a very kind article about me and my work in the Guardian's books section, discussing the role of science fiction in social criticism and activism.

As technology becomes an ever bigger factor in day-to-day life, we need writers like Doctorow to help us direct it to support freedom over oppression. In his other writing, including Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Makers, Doctorow has explored the more optimistic futures that technology might shape. I took some inspiration from Doctorow's work recently in thinking through the potential of an emerging creator culture, one where the great potential of technology is harnessed not to manipulate people for greater profit, but to liberate their natural creativity. It's my gut instinct that our future, much like our today, will be a stark mixture of both Big Brother and creator culture, with all the possibilities in between also represented. But what do you think? Where is the technology of today leading us tomorrow?

Remember that if you are in the Bay area this weekend and yearn to hang about with techies and nerds and people who are some variation of both, that I will part of the Engadget Expand conference taking place at Fort Mason, in San Francisco. And specifically, here is what I’ll be doing on Saturday: [...]

Back in the day — by which I mean the last millennium, y’all –  Jen Larsen and I were part of a loose group of “online diarists” (what we called bloggers before blogs were called blogs) who chatted and sniped and busted each other up over the early Web, with Jen being one of the wittiest of [...]