Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Trotskyist teachers, Doctorow was raised in a Jewish activist household. His father was born in a refugee camp in Azerbaijan and Doctorow became involved in the nuclear disarmament movement and as a Greenpeace campaigner as a child. He received his high school diploma from SEED School, a free school in Toronto, and dropped out of four universities without attaining a degree.

He later served on the board of directors for the Grindstone Island Co-operative on Big Rideau Lake in Ontario, helping to run a conference centre devoted to peace and social justice education and activist training.

In 1992 Doctorow went on a volunteer trip to Costa Rica with Youth Challenge International , which he found "profoundly good and profoundly enriching".

In June 1999, he co-founded the free software P2P software company Opencola with John Henson and Grad Conn. The company was sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario in the summer of 2003.

Doctorow moved to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years, helping to set up the Open Rights Group, before quitting to pursue writing full-time in January 2006. Upon his departure, Doctorow was named a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

He was named the 2006-2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, jointly sponsored by the Royal Fulbright Commission, the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. The academic Chair included a one year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

He then returned to London. He is a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.

In 2009, Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He was formerly a student in the program in 1993-94, but left without completing a thesis.

Doctorow is married to Alice Taylor, and together they have one daughter, named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, who was born in 2008. Cory Doctorow and Alice Taylor married on Sunday, October 26, 2008.

Other work and fellowships

He served as Canadian Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1999.

Together with Austrian art group monochrom he initiated the Instant Blitz Copy Fight project, for which people from all over the world are asked to take flash pictures of copyright warnings in movie theaters.

At the 2003 Torcon 3 World Science Fiction Convention, Doctorow was a featured guest.

On October 31, 2005, Doctorow was involved in a controversy over digital rights management with Sony-BMG, as told in Wikinomics.

Doctorow is a regular contributor to the TVOntario podcast Search Engine, formerly on CBC.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Doctorow's first novel, was published in January 2003, and was the first novel released under one of the Creative Commons licences, allowing readers to circulate the electronic edition as long as they neither made money from it nor used it to create derived works. The electronic edition was released simultaneously with the print edition.

In March 2003, it was re-released under a different Creative Commons licence that allowed derivative works such as fan fiction, but still prohibited commercial usage. It was nominated for a Nebula Award, and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2004. A semi-sequel short story called Truncat was published on Salon.com in August 2003.

Doctorow's other novels have been released under Creative Commons licences that allow derived works and prohibit commercial usage, and he has followed the model of making digital versions available, without charge, at the same time that print versions are published.

His Sunburst Award-winning short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More, was also published in 2004: "0wnz0red" from this collection was nominated for the 2004 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

Doctorow released the bestselling novel Little Brother in 2008 under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike licence. [1] It was nominated for a 2009 Hugo Award, and won the 2009 Prometheus Award, Sunburst Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

"Makers" was released in October 2009, and is being serialized for free on the Tor Books website.

Doctorow's newest young adult novel, "For The Win," was released in May, 2010. The novel is available free on the author's website as a Creative Commons download, and is also published in traditional paper form by Tor Books. The book is centered around massively multiplayer online role-playing games.

Doctorow's nonfiction works include his first book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (co-written with Karl Schroeder and published in 2000), and his contributions to Boing Boing, the weblog he co-edits, as well as regular columns in Popular Science and Make magazines. He is a Contributing Writer to Wired magazine, and contributes occasionally to other magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Globe and Mail, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and the Boston Globe. In 2004, he wrote an essay on Wikipedia included in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, comparing Internet attempts at Hitchhiker's Guide-type resources, including a discussion of the Wikipedia article about himself.

Doctorow contributed the foreword to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky. He also was a contributing writer for the book Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century.

He popularized the term Metacrap in a 2001 essay titled "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia."[2] Some of his non-fiction published between 2001 and 2007 has been collected by Tachyon Publications as Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future.

Doctorow believes that copyright laws should be liberalized to allow for free sharing of all digital media. He has also advocated filesharing. He argues that copyright holders should have a monopoly on selling their own digital media, and copyright laws should only come into play when someone attempts to sell a product currently under someone else's copyright.

Doctorow is an opponent of DRM, claiming that it limits the free sharing of digital media and frequently causes problems for legitimate users (including registration problems that lock users out of their own purchases and prevent them from being able to move their media to other devices and platforms).

The webcomic xkcd occasionally features a partially fictional version of Doctorow who lives in a hot air balloon "up in" the blogosphere ("above the tag clouds") and wears a red cape and goggles, such as in the comic "Blagofaire". When Doctorow won the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award, the presenters gave him a red cape, goggles and a balloon.

xkcd again featured Doctorow in its January 7, 2009 image title text saying "Steve Jobs should be better soon -- now that the Apple Store is getting rid of DRM, Cory Doctorow will get rid of his Steve Jobs voodoo doll."

Science fiction novels

• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Tor Books, 2003) under a Creative Commons Licence
• Eastern Standard Tribe (Tor Books, 2004) under a Creative Commons Licence
• Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (Tor Books, 2005) and under a Creative Commons Licence
• Little Brother (Tor Books, 2008) and under a Creative Commons Licence
• Makers (Tor Books, 2009) and under a Creative Commons Licence
• For The Win (Tor Books, 2010) and under a Creative Commons Licence

Short stories and anthologies

• 0wnz0red, short story, 2002
• " Truncat" (short story) -- a quasi-sequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, 2003
• A Place So Foreign and Eight More (short story collection, Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003)
• " i, robot" (Hugo nominated short story, InfiniteMatrix.net, 2005)
• Stories of the Future Present (short story collection, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007) ISBN 1560259817
• " Scroogled" originally appeared in Radar, 2007
• '" True Names", (short story with Benjamin Rosenbaum) in Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders, ISBN 978-1-59102-692-1, 2008

Other

• Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books. (online text) (February 12, 2004)
• Glenn Yeffeth, ed., The Anthology at the End of the Universe?, chapter titled "Wikipedia: A Genuine H2G2-Minus the Editors", by Cory Doctorow, Benbella Books ISBN 1-932100-56-3
• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (self-help, Alpha Books, 2000)
• Essential Blogging (tech help, O'Reilly and Associates, 2002). ISBN 0-596-00388-9
• /usr/bin/god (novel; Tor Books) — In a June 11, 2008 interview with the Onion's A.V. Club, Doctorow stated that the book was "on the shelf more or less permanently, although it might be resurrected at some point.
• Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (September, 2008)
• There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow / Now is the Best Time of Your Life (Novella, forthcoming)