It's farewell to Cory Doctorow, the Canadian science-fiction writer and electronic freedom fighter. Having touched down on British shores in the middle of 2004 to act as European outreach worker for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital-rights organisation, he is now departing for LA to take up the University of Southern California's Fulbright chair in public diplomacy. A dynamic and striking individual in standard-issue, thick-rimmed geekspex and combat trousers, he is a seasoned public speaker, and is well known for his cult blog Boing Boing, which attracts hundreds of thousands of readers.
Doctorow leaves in his wake a newly formed UK advocacy team, the Open Rights Group. But there is one lingering question: why does Britain need "outreach" from North America when it comes to campaigning for digital rights? After all, it was a British man who invented the worldwide web. Why, when the US gets Silicon Valley with all its alt:latte cool and laptop-toting liberalism, are we stuck with the Silicon Corridor, nestled in the UK's debt heartland, Reading?
Digital rights are basically human and civil rights for the internet age. Covering everything from privacy to freedom of speech, they have two core characteristics. First, because the internet speeds up and increases the volumes of information flow around the world, digital rights often crash headlong into intellectual property law, especially copyright. Second, because digital rights have to do with computers and modems and routers and things, those not blessed with a self-indulgent geeky streak tend to give them a wide berth. Because, like, that's all a bit technical, isn't it?
We British don't like to brag about it, but this country is still a home for some of the world's best open-source coders - Ben Laurie, who coded the security software that deals with most credit card transactions online, and Alan Cox, until recently second lieutenant in coding and maintaining a core part of the open-source operating system Linux, among others. So it seems silly that we should need help from the US to keep the digital future fair.
The truth is, it's the politics that keeps digital-rights campaigning so unsexy on this side of the Atlantic. In America, lawyers such as Lawrence Lessig can swan in and out of the Supreme Court at leisure, filing suits against the state for offences to free speech with the help of the good old US constitution. In Britain, we have to rely on legislation from Brussels.
There have been significant victories on digital-rights issues in Europe, most notably the European Parliament's decision to reject the idea of extending patent law to cover software code and business models. But the lack of understanding about Europe's political processes and values makes campaigning on digital rights that much harder.
