Cory Doctorow is a busy man. He’s known for a great series of science fiction and fantasy novels including “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,” “Little Brother” and “For The Win.” He’s a blogger and journalist, a co-editor of Boing Boing, and a activist for changing copyright laws.

This fall he has two new books out. One is the graphic novel “In Real Life” which is based on his acclaimed short story “Anda’s Game.” A collaboration with artist Jen Wang, the book tells the story of a young female gamer, gold farmers, culture clash and the potential to change the world. The second is a nonfiction book “Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free” about internet culture and technology. We spoke recently about the two books, comics, gender, labor, DRM, and many, many other topics.

ALEX DUEBEN: Have you always been interested in comics?

CORY DOCTOROW: Yes, though I was never a "comics kid." My first love was prose books, and it went into high gear when I walked into Bakka Books, the science fiction bookstore in Toronto, and the writer Tanya Huff (who worked there at the time, and whose job I later got when she quit to write fulltime) sold nine-year-old me a used copy of H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy. That was it–I started taking the subway downtown as often as possible to get my fix.

But Bakka was opposite the Silver Snail, an amazing comics store, and around the corner from Dragon Lady, and so I started reading comics too, though not as aggressively as I read novels.

AD: This new graphic novel is based on your short story, “Anda’s Game.” Could you talk a little about where the idea for the story came from?

CD: This is the third iteration of an idea that I've been circling around since the early 2000s. It started with a Slashdot story about a (notoriously unreliable) games developer announcing that he'd been secretly paying cheap Mexican workers to labor in a popular video-game in order to amass game-treasure that could be sold on Ebay.

That idea rolled around and around in my head and in summer 2005, I wrote a story called “Anda's Game” (the title a play on “Ender's Game”), which imagined labour unions taking advantage of the fact that "gold farmers" worked in a gamespace that their bosses didn't own–a space that actually prohibited the bosses’ business!–so that they could organise workers who were otherwise not reachable.

This, in turn, related to my frustration with the dialog about globalism and labour that started in the 1980s, with the Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney war on unions. When the car wars kicked off and jobs began to move from Detroit and southern Ontario to Mexico, the workers there acted as though the enemy was *Mexicans*, not their bosses.

This was profoundly ahistorical. In the early days of the labour movement, when waves of new immigrants were regularly presenting themselves as new industrial workforces, it was common for the bosses to fire striking workers from one country and replace them with scabs from another, and then use racism to play them off against each other–“You're the proud sons of Germany! Are you going to let some lazy Irish pig tell you that you're not allowed to earn a buck?”

(This was used with real savagery when it came to African Americans who'd come north in the post-slavery era, who were routinely denied access to the best jobs and who were ruthlessly exploited by a cruel ruling class that recruited them as thug labor, to break strikers’ skulls with the Pinkertons)

It was bizarre to watch the descendants of the workers who only won basic rights by seeing through their bosses' cynical race-baiting, now falling prey to exactly the same kind of race-baiting. As soon as the Detroit workforce was convinced that the answer to their problem lay in racist, anti-Mexican bumper-stickers–and not in going to Mexico to unionize their brothers and sisters there, chasing GM and Ford to the ends of the earth–they had lost.

But of course, Mexican factories were in “Free Trade Zones” where union organizing is illegal and where corrupt police can beat, torture and kill with impunity (though it was hardly better in the early days of the American rustbelt–check out the Wikipedia pages on the Flint Sit-Down Strike or the Calumet, MI Copper Miners’ Strike).

But when the outsourcing movement reached Silicon Valley and programmer jobs started to flow to India, American workers' reaction was even more shortsighted and stupid.

After all, the workers in India who were doing the jobs that these displaced techies had once held all spoke English, and all used the same Internet. If you'd told a labour organiser in 1913 that he could reach out to replacement workers half a world away and talk to them in his native language, he'd have laughed at the ease of the task before him. You mean I don't have to learn a foreign language and entire a hostile nation to reach out to these workers and ask them to stand in solidarity with me and mine?

My gold farmer stories imagine a globalised labour movement with the bravery and smarts of the IWW and the other early unions. They come out of game guilds–a guild being pretty close to a union already–where they have honed the skills of cooperation and tactics, and they have a shared identity as gamers that they appeal to in their quest for labour justice.

"Anda’s Game" went viral, and was, for a time, a lot better known than the still-obscure practice of gold farming itself, so that whenever a story about gold farmers hit the news, I was praised for my predictive ability (William Gibson calls this “predicting the present”).

By 2006 or so, gold farming was totally mainstream and there were hundreds of thousands of workers in the Pacific rim making a living at it–mostly Chinese workers. In 2009, I started work on a novel called "For The Win," a global, multi-POV young adult novel about a trade union called the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web (or
“Webblies”) (I stole all this stuff from Ken MacLeod). I travelled to Mumbai and Singapore and south China, and was given generous assistance from gamers, writers, dissidents, academics, and labour organisers.

I had originally thought that For The Win would be a graphic novel series–a series of three-single arcs that would each showcase a different gameworld and real-world setting (gamers in El Salvador playing mecha-fighter combat/strategy games, say).

But in the end, First Second asked for Anda's Game–with its simple, stripped down story–for a graphic novel adaptation, and found the amazing Jen Wang (whose Koko Be Good is one of the best graphic novels I've ever read) to work on it.

Jen did ALL the heavy lifting on this project -- I want to be crystal clear on this. There are so many gracenotes in it that are entirely of her own making. I recognise my fingerprints on it, but it's a collaboration in which she is the senior partner, and it's her vision and visual sensibility that brings this story to life.

AD: Was it important to have the main character be a woman?

CD: Every character has to have a gender. Why shouldn't Anda be female? I don't mean to be flip, but no one has ever asked me why the hero of Little Brother is a dude, but I get this question a lot about Anda.

AD: I bring it up for two reasons. One, so many of the science fiction and fantasy stories we grew up with are about young men who confronted with the status quo, attack it and make a better world–and we don’t have a lot of those stories with female protagonists.

CD: Well, that's true, but I think the point still stands. The only curious thing about a female gamer protagonist is that it's curious!

50% of gamers are women. My wife is a former nationally ranked Quake champion who played for England. The real question isn't "why is your gamer protagonist a girl?"–it's "why aren't half of everyone else's gamer protagonists girls, too?"

AD: That’s true, but my second reason for asking is that in real life you have people like Anita Sarkeesian–and we have lots of these issues in comics as well–who when they criticize or point out problems, are savagely attacked and threatened. You’re right–you shouldn’t be asked why was it important for Anda to be a woman–others who never write female protagonists should be asked, why don’t you write more interesting female characters.

CD: Exactly!

AD: Did you have any particular concerns or interests in adapting the book into comics? Is there something you wanted to make happen or something you wanted to avoid?

CD: I was such a noob here, all I wanted was for it to be awesome. When I saw that Jen Wang, whose Koko Be Good was such a fantastic book, was working on it, I was over the moon.

AD: Talk a little about working with Jen Wang and how she influenced the way the book turned out.

CD: Jen did ALL the heavy lifting. She is the senior partner in this collaboration, and I was mostly involved in doing editorial work on the script and weighing in on her adaptation decisions. Sometimes I got to veto things, sometimes I didn't, because when someone great is working on an adaptation, that person should be able to put her stamp on things.

AD: The short story’s title, "Anda’s Game" came out you riffing off the title “Ender’s Game,” as you mentioned. Why did you decide to title the graphic novel, “In Real Life?”

CD: That was a brainstorming session between Jen, me and the editors at First Second. We had a long list of titles we liked, and converged on IRL. It's a nice bit of wordplay, and cleaves the discussion of online and offline right at the joint–whenever something terrible happens on the Internet, the apologists immediately tell you it's not "real" because it's online. The Internet is the nervous system of the 21st century and what happens there is assuredly real.

I'm in the middle of a kind of awful bro-storm over publicly supporting Anita Sarkeesian, the games critic who has been relentlessly smeared and threatened for daring to point out the misogynist tropes in games (my awful bro-storm is nothing as compared to hers, let me add).

The bros who want to discount Sarkeesian's experience have a common talking point: "It's a game, it's the net, it's not real life." But of course, the net is real life. Games are real life, because they are played by real people. Games are art. Art deserves to be taken seriously. Critical work about art is a crucial part of art production and culture. "It's only made up" is perhaps the stupidest thing you can say to rebut such criticism.

AD: You have another book out this fall from McSweeneys, Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free. Huge corporations have told me that information does want to be free - who are you to make a title suggesting otherwise?

CD: Ha! Someone who gives it all away for free, I guess.

The point of the book is that framing the discussion about censorship and surveillance as being related, somehow, to the desires of an abstraction like "information" misses the point.

Information doesn't want anything (except for us to stop anthropomorphizing it).

But PEOPLE want to be free. And if your copyright business model requires mass Internet surveillance; or systems that are designed to covertly run programs to stop their owners from watching TV or reading books in unapproved ways; or easy censorship of anything on the Internet by saying "That infringes me" without a court-case or even any evidence; or disconnection of whole families from the Internet because someone is accused of listening to music the wrong way within 1000' of their Wifi access-point; or a prohibition on telling people about vulnerabilities in the computers that they depend on for everything from banking to health to love to education because those vulnerabilities might lead to them installing non-App-store Apps on said computer; or any of the other horribles of the decades-long Copyright Wars, then your copyright business model sucks.

AD: Seriously though, talk about Cory Doctorow’s three laws of the internet? (And why three?)

CD: Three because when I came up with one and told my agent about it, he told me, "Look, I'm Arthur C Clarke's agent and I'll tell you what I told him: you need three laws. One won't cut it." Who am I to argue?

1. Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and won't give you the key, that lock isn't for your benefit.

Amazon, Apple, Google, Adobe, and many other digital marketplaces will sell your work with "copy protection" locks on it. What they don't tell you is that your work can't run on any of their rivals' systems unless those locks are removed, and that the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it an imprisonable felony for anyone other than the lockmaker to remove it.

That means that every time you sell an app through the App Store, or an audiobook through Audible, or a DRM-locked ebook on Google Play or Amazon, you are locking YOUR customers to THEIR stores. If you have a dispute with those companies later over how much of your money they get to keep (cough Hachette cough), the can tell you to go pound sand because your customers will have to buy your works all over again to follow you to one of their rivals if you ragequit and pull your stuff from their store.

2. Fame won't make you rich, but you can't sell art without it.

When Tim O'Reilly said "For most artists, the problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity," he wasn't saying "Get famous and the riches will follow." He meant that unless people know about your stuff, they won't give you any money for it.

Figuring out how to turn an audience into money isn't easy, but figuring out how to turn NO audience into money is IMPOSSIBLE.

Every time creators side with big corporate lobbyists who want to make it harder for their works to be discovered or published -- rules to make it easier to remove stuff from Youtube, rules that make it easier to have search results censored, rules that allow the City of London Police to issue no-evidence, no-judge orders to advertising brokers and domain registrars to shut down alleged "pirate" sites without any oversight, the creators are making it that much harder to make themselves known WITHOUT signing an abusive, shitty mega-entertaintment-corp contract.

If we let Big Content shut down all the indie channels for distribution, payment and discovery, we don't just screw over all the indie creators -- we ALSO screw over the creators who have deals with labels, studios and publishers.

Because the worst deal that a big company can offer you has to be better than the best deal you can make for yourself by going indie.

The success of In Rainbows, Wool, and Minecraft all set the floor on negotiations with big publishers. If the indie channels are choked off by ham-fisted copyright enforcement, there'll be nowhere to go when the publishers, studios and labels put the squeeze on their talent pool.

3. Information Doesn't Want to Be Free (but people do)

This is the big one. When we frame the question of who gets to speak on the net, and who gets to silence speech on the net, as a copyright one, then we ignore the fact that the Internet is the nervous system of the 21st Century, and pretend that it's just a better VOD system.

The copyright wars have weakened the security of the devices and networks that we are literally stitching the fabric of the world out of -- your car is a computer you ride in, your house is a computer you live in, and when the earbuds you're wearing now cause you to get a hearing aid in a decade or two, it'll be a computer you put inside your body. The gesture- and voice-controlled interfaces emerging today mean that every place in the world will likely have video and audio sensors in it.

But we have rules that say that you can't tell people about flaws in these systems, lest they be leveraged into jailbreaking methods that defeat "copyright protection" systems. These rules mean that the computers that are literally life-and-death matters are becoming long-lived reservoirs of vulnerabilities that threaten every corner of your life. For example, the World Wide Web Consortium is now going ahead with plans to cripple your browsers with technology that is supposed to stop you from saving Netflix streams to your hard-drive, and which also makes it illegal to report flaws in your browser (which can, incidentally, access your camera, mic, location, passwords and all your files).

AD: Does it seem fitting in a certain sense that you have a book coming out from a division of Macmillan, which has waged its own battles with Amazon, at a time when Hachette is at war with Amazon?

CD: I think the two situations are very different! Macmillan fought with Amazon over pricing. I'm actually neutral on the question of how to price ebooks; I think that this is a technical question that can be answered with data, looking at the curve of how to maximize revenue.

Obviously, lower prices generate more sales, but less revenue: at a certain point, the "more sales/less revenue" lines cross and somewhere in there is a sweet spot. I suspect that Macmillan and Amazon had different maximization priorities; Amazon wants to maximize not just its revenue from Kindle books, but from Kindle readers and the Kindle platform, while Macmillan wants to maximize revenue from the books alone, so it's natural that they'd fight over this.

And of course, part of the resolution of the Macmillan feud was that Tor–the largest sf publisher in the world, who publish all my novels in the USA–dropped DRM from ALL of its ebooks, on Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Nook, and everywhere else!

AD: For all the talk about how books are not just another item, talking about market power and Amazon trying to act like it’s 1984, I can’t help but feel that DRM - which, to be polite, is complete bullshit - should be a much bigger issue in this conversation. How optimistic are you that we’ll see a change in DRM in the coming years? That we'll reach a point where you can convert ebook formats as easily as we convert word processing formats?

CD: The thing that will drive this is the fact that DRM locks books to DRM companies, at the expense of the economic interests and self-determination of publishers. Eventually, publishers will wise up to what I call "Doctorow's first law": Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won't give you a key, that lock isn't there for your benefit.

As I wrote in my new Locus column:

Under the DMCA, removing DRM is against the law, even if you're not otherwise violating copyright. For example, under copyright, you have the "fair use" right to publish brief excerpts from a movie as part of your critical analysis, but if that movie is locked up with DRM (as all DVDs are), you are not allowed to remove the DRM to accomplish this.

Likewise, your right to "format shift" your DVDs to files that can play on a tablet or phone is superseded by the prohibition on removing DRM to do this. That's why Apple's Itunes will helpfully rip your CDs and load them onto your tablet for you, but won't do the same for your DVDs.

Critically, publishers, authors and other copyright holders cannot create or distribute DRM-breaking technology to unlock their own works, after those works have been locked up with a tech company's DRM. Random House, with all its market might, cannot authorize you or enable you to break the Amazon DRM on its books.

And without this DRM removal, you can't move Amazon ebooks to competing ereaders -- Kobo, Nook, etc -- meaning that every dollar that Random House books generate in sales is a dollar that Random House's customers will have to surrender if Amazon and Random House part ways and Random House hopes to tempt those readers to come along as it moves to one of Amazon's rivals.

This isn't a hypothetical, these days. As I write this, in July 2014, we're into the second month of a serious dispute between Hachette (owner of Little, Brown; Orbit, and many other imprints) and Amazon over pricing, discounts and promotions, in which Amazon has simply stopped carrying Hachette ebooks in its Kindle store. Hachette could fight back by offering a tool to convert all your Kindle books to run on rival platforms and offer 50 percent discounts on all its titles everywhere *except* Amazon until the dispute was resolved, sending tens of thousands of previously loyal Kindle customers into a rival's clutches.

Or rather, Hachette *can't* do that, because the company has a doctrinaire belief in DRM, and has insisted that every one of its ebooks ever sold by Amazon had Amazon's DRM on it. Only Amazon can remove Amazon's DRM from Hachette books, and they're in no hurry to release Hachette's readers from their walled garden.