Inside Assange

The sequel to Little brother, titled Homeland, is published in February 2013. We will find out how the hacker revolutionaries have adapted to the Presidency of Obama, who has out-golfed Bush W by a large margin, kept Gitmo open, assassinated without legal process and must own up to Eric Holder. Make sure you find the promised free internet version (craphound.com). It'd be a crime to feed the capitalist piggies when you can avoid it.

The author

Doctorow's day job is at The Guardian where his columns provide a left libertarian critique of intellectual property law. He thinks it oppresses creators, who, as he admits, all too often will work for nothing. Perhaps when The Guardian ceases to send him cheques he will concede that the position of the "industrial" producers of content is even more dire. For the artist there are grants and welfare; Fairfax may become a branch of the ABC, but for the rest of them it's sell or sink. Or perhaps the recipe for a libertarian socialist intellectual property regime is this:

"Add up all the samples in each song and then require a proportional royalty from revenues earned by the song. There are details to be sorted – dealing with overlapping samples, and establishing use thresholds for the minimum sample length covered by the rule and the maximum sample length it countenances before we just say, "You're not sampling, this is just a reissue, pay the mechanical royalty." There's the accounting, auditing, collection and payment. "

Is this man agin the system, or does he want to be its chartered accountant?

Here's a better test. Where does he stand on the Levenson-Finkelstein proposals for politically correcting the media?

"I'd love to watch the Murdochs twist in the wind as much as anyone, and I hope they do. But whatever pleasure their comeuppance gives, it shouldn't be an excuse for an attack on the power of the press itself. There is no law regarding the press or journalists that won't end up entangled in the affairs of everyday internet users who concern themselves with the world around them."

He could not love the press so much loved he not the internet more, to paraphrase Robert Louis Stevenson. Don't expect to see Doctorow at the barricades when the police come to take away the first non-complying print editor. Will he even tweet?