I'm convinced Cory Doctorow is a jackass

Well no, I’ve never actually met the guy, but something really bugs me about Cory Doctorow. As a frequent reader of boingboing.net, I encounter Doctorow’s words and pictures almost daily, which many times I enjoy viewing and feel better informed for having seen, but I can’t help but detect an air of pretension in a lot of what Cory has to say. Also, I don’t think he takes very good pictures. Ongoing series my butt.

To better confirm my theory I googled “Cory Doctorow” and “jackass” and got about 3,000 odd results. One of them was a blog entry I feel like linking for posterity’s sake, concerning Doctorow, a well known copyright reformer, duplicating other writers work without permission on his and other websites, essentially profiting off of that content (other people’s content) through his site’s ad revenue.

Googling “Cory Doctorow” and “suck” returns almost 55,000 hits, one of which is a website dedicated to the suckiest Cory Doctorow posts on boingboing. How does one measure suck? A better summation of corysucks.com can be found here.

Finally, listening to a small bit of TWiT (ep 135) revealed to me that Doctorow has a habit of hassling podcast sponsors who he does not agree with. Audible.com, an audiobook rental site, was talked down by Cory while the hosts plugged the site in an advert (Cory doesn’t like DRM). I assume this happened on TWiT 124 which I haven’t listened to it yet, so I can’t say for sure, but still that’s a pretty jackass thing to do Cory! Podcasts depend on that revenue to operate and need to keep those advertising relationships to keep the lights on. You think a guest would have better manners (Cory is Canadian after all).

If anything, the tech industry, and especially the blog-o-sphere, breeds its fair share of characters. I believe Cory has been in the limelight long enough and has made rounds at all of the appropriate geek events to be considered a public figure, at least among us who read the internet, so I feel that airing my grievances about him, especially on my own chunk of the world wide web, is fair.

This ongoing series will probably be updated as I see fit. If you or anyone you know has fallen victim to Cory Doctorow’s hackney brand of writing/picturing taking feel free to comment and add your two cents.

UPDATE: It seems that Cory’s reputation precedes him on livejournal. (Thanks for the tip, k!)