LePartisan.info À propos Podcasts Fil web
Flux grenoblois
Fr3 Alpes Fr.Bleu Isère Infos épinglées Agendas Ressources Assos Webcams
Écologie BLOGS Revues Médias
🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist
TOUTES LES SOURCES 

PLURALISTIC

▸ les 10 dernières parutions

24.11.2025 à 15:41

Pluralistic: Cooking in Maximum Security (24 Nov 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3078 mots)


Today's links


The cover of Half Letter Press's edition of 'Cooking in Maximum Security,' featuring a line-art drawing of a moka coffee pot.

Cooking in Maximum Security (permalink)

Cooking in Maximum Security is a slim volume of prisoners' recipes and improvised cooking equipment, a testament to the ingenuity of a network of prisoners in Italy's maximum security prisons:

https://halfletterpress.com/cooking-in-maximum-security/

Cooking in Maximum Security has a new English translation from Half Letter Press, who also publish the classic Prisoners' Inventions, which is one of my favorite books of all time, a collection of keenly observed, beautifully drawn material improvisations from America's prisons:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention

Prison cookbooks are a genre unto themselves, with "underground" classics like Jailhouse Cookbook:

http://jailhousecookbook.com/

And slick coffee-table books like Prison Ramen:

https://www.eater.com/23900359/gastropod-instant-ramen-prison-ramen-recipes-stories-maruchan-cup-noodle

But Cooking in Maximum Security drills down much deeper on the method than those other books, elevating the makerish improvisation of the chefs whose work it reproduces. They explain how to make an oven out of a wooden stool lined with cigarette foil and draped with heavy blankets, into which a small gas burner is introduced:

https://www.cookinginmaximumsecurity.com/tools/

Or how to turn a toothbrush handle and the razor blade from a pencil-sharpener into an all-purpose paring knife:

https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-l4sjfhdy/images/stencil/2048×2048/products/771/3042/CookinginMax4__83959.1762438870.jpg?c=2

These field-expedient gadget improvisations are incredibly satisfying. They have the vibe of a good episode of Scrapheap Challenge, or the high-stakes duct-tape ingenuity of Apollo 13. And while these recipes and build notes were collected in the 2010s, the pencil/charcoal illustrations have a classic 1970s feel, like the illustrations out of the Moosewood Cookbook or The Joy of Sex. If you love the kind of clever repurposings that filled the pages of Make magazine, you'll love this.

Plus, the food sounds incredible. Mouth-watering. Fresh bread whose dough was warmed and risen by setting it atop the heat-radiating surface of a CRT television!

One thing that sets Cooking in Maximum Security apart from other prison cookbooks is the unique character of Italian maximum security prisons, in which visitors are allowed to bring a fairly large variety of goods to inmates, and where the commissary is stocked with an incredible variety of basic ingredients, including things like goat and beef livers (the book reproduces an entire commissary menu, with prices, as an appendix). Prisoners have access to beer and wine, and find endless uses for old beer cans. The book also drops in casual clues about life in an Italian prison, for example, when it suggests getting your wooden stirrer by taking down a crucifix and using that.

Cooking in Maximum Security arose out of a project called "MoCa" (a play on the essential moka coffee maker that is the most versatile and widely used tool in this book). Prisoners met with, and corresponded with, outside helpers who put together the entire volume. One collaborator, Mario, died shortly after sending a long letter (reproduced in an appendix) from solitary confinement, and this letter, along with other notes interspersed through the recipes, give a brilliant anthropological account of life in Italian maximum security prisons.

The MoCa project isn't done – they've embarked on "Phase II," which will collect recipes from Spanish prisoners.

It's a remarkable book, and an essential companion to Prisoner's Inventions.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony rootkit hurts artists https://web.archive.org/web/20051125121608/http://businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2005/tc20051122_343542.htm

#20yrsago Anti-game lawyer loses right to practice law in Alabama https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/11/5613-2/

#20yrsago Tech business niches begging to be filled https://techcrunch.com/2005/11/21/companies-id-like-to-profile-but-dont-exist/

#20yrsago Giving EU air-passenger data to US DHS is illegal https://www.rte.ie/news/2005/1122/70024-eu/

#15yrsago What John Pistole means when he talks about “enhanced” TSA checkpoints https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wrDzMD_BC8

#15yrsago Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock explained in 32 seconds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJKHFPBwDRA

#15yrsago TSA looks at Adam Savage’s junk, misses his two 12″ razor blades https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3yaqq9Jjb4

#10yrsago What’s inside a “Hello Barbie” surveillance toy? https://www.somersetrecon.com/blog/2015/11/20/hello-barbie-security-part-1-teardown

#10yrsago J Edgar Hoover loved Efrem Zimbalist’s “FBI” https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/nov/23/efrem-zimbalist-fbi-file/

#10yrsago Blankets: New edition of Craig Thompson’s graphic masterpiece https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/23/blankets-new-edition-of-craig-thompsons-graphic-masterpiece/

#10yrsago Randall Munroe does a Q&A with stick-figure comics https://time.com/4116921/randall-munroe-draws-his-own-conclusions/

#10yrsago On the grotesque obsession with accomplished women’s fertility https://harpers.org/archive/2015/10/the-mother-of-all-questions/?single=1

#10yrsago How browser extensions steal logins & browsing habits; conduct corporate espionage https://labs.detectify.com/security-guidance/chrome-extensions-google-is-tracking-you/

#10yrsago Activist tricked into 6-year relationship with undercover cop tells her story https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/nov/20/lisa-jones-girlfriend-of-undercover-police-office-mark-kennedy-interview

#5yrsago An Especially Cursed House https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/22/especially-cursed/#mcmansion-hell

#5yrsago Guatemala's guillotines https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#guillotines

#5yrsago The power of procurements https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#procurements

#5yrsago Labor and large firms https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#monopsony

#5yrsago A textbook grift https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#racket

#5yrsago Australian predictive policing tool for kids https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#phrenology

#5yrsago Opsec and personal security https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#asl

#1yrago Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/23/hack-the-class-war/#robo-boss

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

22.11.2025 à 20:08

Pluralistic: Boss preppers (22 Nov 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3822 mots)


Today's links


A forest bunker, set into the hillside; it has been covered with a gold texture. Before it, crouched in the leaf-litter, is a figure in fatigues aiming a gigantic rifle. The figure the head of a millionaire from a Gilded Age editorial cartoon, wearing Oakley tactical glasses. The gun has also been gilded.

Boss preppers (permalink)

Sometimes, you learn a fact that makes everything else make sense – one of those keystone insights that puts a whole phenomenon into perspective. For example, the fact that preppers are engaged in a very specific type of wish-fulfillment.

I learned this during the first part of the pandemic lockdowns, when preppers were very much in our collective consciousness. On the Media featured an interview between Micah Loewinger and Richard Mitchell, author of Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times which features ethnographic studies of preppers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

Mitchell described how preppers make ready for specific forms of societal collapse, based not on the likelihood of the event itself, but rather, based on how useful they would be in that situation. For example, a water chemist has made extensive preparations for an event in which terrorists poison the water-supply. When pressed, he couldn't explain why terrorists would choose his town to target with an attack like this, but basically thought it would be really cool if the only person who could save his town was him.

This is the "disaster fantasy" that propels the prepper movement, in which a functional, high-tech world of wicked, systemic problems is replaced with a fallen, low-tech society where the problems are all simple. A world of simple problems is a world of individual actors, where every struggle is just about what one person can make someone else do, or offer to someone else. It's a perfect world if you've been raised on Thatcher's neoliberal doctrine that "there is no such thing as society," only to find yourself in a society in which you can only make real change by participating in collective efforts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/24/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano

All this raises the question of what rich preppers are prepping for. If your contribution to society consists of "allocating capital" and/or giving people orders, what, exactly, is the disaster that fulfills your fantasy of a world where your unique skills are the only thing that can save us all? What kind of a disaster needs a boss?

In Douglas Rushkoff's 2022 book Survival of the Richest, he describes a surreal "futurism" consulting gig in which a bunch of wealthy investor types asked him to help them figure out how to keep their mercenaries in line after "The Event" (the end of the world):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

These guys had the idea that what a fallen civilization needed was bosses, you see, but they were self-aware enough to recognize that the people who survived the apocalypse might not recognize their unique genius and simply fall into line. In order to assert their natural role as leaders after the shit hit the fan, these guys would need an army of heavily armed mercenaries. But again, these guys were self-aware enough to recognize that the mercenaries might also fail to recognize their unique fitness to rule and opt instead to slaughter them and raid their hoarded food, ammo and medical supplies.

So they wanted Rushkoff's advice – should they fit the mercs with bomb-collars that were on a dead-man's switch that would go off if the boss croaked? This was such a weird and revealing moment that Rushkoff got a whole book out of exploring the desire of the wealthy to both secede from the rest of us, and keep us all in line.

I was inspired by this and other experiences with people fantasizing about the world's end to take a run at rewriting Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" as a story about investor/ubermenschen in a luxury bunker at the end of the world (spoiler: it doesn't go well for them):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque

All of this has been very much on my mind lately because I've been reading Quinn Slobodian's amazing Hayek's Bastards, a closely researched history of the merger of the neoliberal wing of the conservative movement with its white nationalist faction, producing a conservativism obsessed with "hard borders, hard-wired human difference, and hard money":

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/472194/hayeks-bastards-by-slobodian-quinn/9780241774984

It's a revelatory history, one that argues convincingly that the brooding, violent racism of MAGA isn't so much a break with "Romney conservativism" of the "respectable" Republican Party as it is the attainment of the goals of the party's longstanding dominant tendency.

"Hard-wired human differences" refers to the "scientific racism" that the likes of Elon Musk push, the junk science that insists that there is such a thing as a "race," that IQ measures something important and immutable, and that different "races" have different IQs, which is why some "races" do well, while others do poorly:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

"Hard-wired human difference" militates for "hard borders," since the teeming billions of racially inferior people in other countries would – given half a chance – come to the "good" countries and turn them into "shithole countries." This is the nonsense that Musk is peddling when he compares Britons to "hobbits" and warns that they're about to be overrun by people who will "start raping the kids":

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/elon-musk-compares-brits-to-hobbits-amid-shock-immigration-claim_uk_69089785e4b0c4a0f509d6f5?origin=home-latest-unit

But because the soft-headed, soft-hearted hobbits keep electing leaders who don't understand this, they'll get "overrun" by the bad "races," who demand welfare handouts, which the state can't afford, triggering "money printing" and Musk's other obsession, national debts:

https://fortune.com/2025/07/01/trump-spending-bill-pain-points-critics-elon-musk-medicaid-national-debt-clean-energy/

(Which is to say, Musk's understanding of money is just as wrongheaded as his understanding of genomics):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/10/compton-cowboys/#the-deficit-myth

In the disaster fantasy, the failure of hard borders leads to the inevitable consequences of hard-wired human differences, which means that we need "hard money" – gold. The modern right is a linear descendant of the goldbug movement, composed of grifters who made fortunes terrifying racists into buying gold as a hedge against the day when the collapse of the welfare state leads to race war and the dollar's vaporization:

https://mises.org/library/book/gold-peace-and-prosperity?d7_alias_migrate=1

For goldbugs, the coming collapse seems to be one that will demand coin collectors. In Hayek's Bastards, Slobodian quotes all these goldbug preppers furiously dreaming of a day when a single gold coin will let them buy a whole city block in Manhattan. Somehow, they've conceived of disaster scenario where the most needful of all things is a ductile metal with a few marginal uses in electronics.

It's a very weird kind of disaster fantasy. One can only assume that the guys figuring out how to assemble an army of bomb-collared mercs will just stroll over to these goldbugs' lesser bunkers and take their precious coins.

The modern goldbug is, of course, a crypto weirdo, and man is that a weird thing to be a prepper about. It will be a very odd apocalypse indeed that takes down all of modern civilization except for blockchains.

(Image: Morten Jensen, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony insider: DRM is discredited at Sony https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/20/sony-insider-drm-is-discredited-at-sony/

#20yrsago Microsoft: Trusted Computing sucks! https://web.archive.org/web/20060821002450/http://news.com.com/Who+has+the+right+to+control+your+PC/2100-1029_3-5961609.html

#20yrsago EFF brings class-action against Sony! https://web.archive.org/web/20051125183030/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_11.php#004192

#20yrsago Texas sues Sony over rootkits — YEE-HAW! https://web.archive.org/web/20060204212201/https://www.oag.state.tx.us/oagNews/release.php?id=1266

#20yrsago 1,000 sqft secret chamber discovered in Indian National Library https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/secret-chamber-in-national-library/articleshow/6957358.cms

#15yrsago Who owns your mortgage, the mind-croggling flowchart edition https://web.archive.org/web/20101118032158/https://www.zerohedge.com/article/just-when-you-thought-you-knew-something-about-mortgage-securitizations

#15yrsago When did you choose to be straight? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtjqLUHYoY

#15yrsago Dear airlines: goodbye https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/11/dear-airline-im-leaving-you/66750/

#15yrsago How TSA screeners feel about junk-touching https://web.archive.org/web/20140928131617/https://flyingwithfish.boardingarea.com/2010/11/18/tsa-enhanced-pat-downs-the-screeners-point-of-view/

#10yrsago Yahoo blocks some users from accessing email until they turn off ad-blocking https://web.archive.org/web/20151121172408/https://consumerist.com/2015/11/20/use-adblock-and-yahoo-may-block-you-from-reading-your-e-mail/

#10yrsago Alan Moore’s brilliantly bonkers lost 1980s Star Wars comics https://web.archive.org/web/20151122232854/https://www.techtimes.com/tags/alan-moores-star-wars

#10yrsago The secret history of the Haunted Mansion’s hall of changing paintings https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-changing-portrait-hall-that-never.html

#10yrsago England: You have four days to reply to the secret consultation on the NHS’s future https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/19/nhs-mandate-england-consulation-deadline

#10yrsago Southwest Airlines surrenders to racists, refuses boarding to Arab-American passengers https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/philly-pizza-shop-owner-profiled-southwest-airlines/89976/

#5yrsago Nintendo vs Nintendees https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/21/wrecking-ball/#ssbm

#5yrsago Google's monopoly rigged the ad market https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adtech

#5yrsago Facebook bullies watchdog https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adobserver

#5yrsago We're already (badly) forgiving student debt https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#student-debt

#5yrsago Little Revolutions https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#asl

#1yrago Expert agencies and elected legislatures https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

20.11.2025 à 10:53

Pluralistic: The long game (20 Nov 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (5235 mots)


Today's links


The classic Puck Magazine editorial cartoon entitled 'The King of All Commodities,' depicting John D Rockefeller as a man with grotesquely tiny body and a gigantic head, wearing a crown emblazoned with the names of the industrial concerns he owned. Rockefeller's head has been replaced with that of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. The names of the industrial concerns have been replaced with the wordmarks for Scale AI, Instagram, Oculus and Whatsapp. The dollar-sign at the crown's pinnacle has been replaced with the Facebook 'f' logo. The chain around Rockefeller's neck sports the charm that Mark Zuckerberg now wears around his neck.

The long game (permalink)

Well, this fucking sucks. A federal judge has decided that Meta is not a monopolist, and that its acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp were not an illegal bid to secure and maintain a monopoly:

https://gizmodo.com/meta-learns-that-nothing-is-a-monopoly-if-you-just-wait-long-enough-2000687691

This is particularly galling because Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly, explicitly declared that these mergers were undertaken to reduce competition, which is the only circumstance in which pro-monopoly economists and lawyers say that mergers should be blocked.

Let me take a step back here. During the Reagan years, a new economic orthodoxy took hold, a weird combination of economic theory and conspiracy theory that held that:

a) It was bad economic policy to try and prevent monopolization, since monopolies are "efficient" and arise because companies are so totally amazing that we all voluntarily buy their products and pay for their services and;

b) The anti-monopoly laws on the books are actually pro-monopoly laws, and if you look at them just right, you'll find that what Congress really intended was for monopolies to be nurtured and protected:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

The one exception these monsters of history were willing to make to their pro-monopoly posture was this: if a corporation undertakes a merger because they are seeking a monopoly, then the government should step in and stop them. This is a great standard to come up with if what you really want to do is nothing, because how can you know why a company truly wants to buy another company? Who can ever claim to know what is in another person's heart?

This is a great wheeze if you want to allow as many monopolies as possible, unless the guy who's trying to get that monopoly is Mark Zuckerberg, because Zuck is a man who has never had a criminal intention he did not immediately put to writing and email to someone else.

This is the guy who put in writing the immortal words, "It is better to buy than to compete," and "what we’re really buying is time," and who described his plans to clone a competitor's features as intended to get there "before anyone can get close to their scale again":

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

Basically, Zuck is the guy who works until 2:30 every night, and then, before turning in, sends some key executive a fully discoverable, immortally backed-up digital message that reads, "Hey Bob, you know that guy we were thinking about killing? Well, I've decided we should do it. And for avoidance of doubt, it's 100% a murder, and right now, at this moment, I am premeditating it."

And despite this wealth of evidence as to Zuckerberg's intention at the time, US regulators at the FTC and EU regulators at the Commission both waved through those mergers, as well as many other before and since. Because it turns out that in the pro-monopoly world, there are no bright lines, no mergers so nakedly corrupt that they should be prevented. All that stuff about using state power to prevent deliberate monopolization was always and forever just bullshit. In the pro-monopoly camp, all monopolies are warmly welcome.

It wasn't always this way. In the trustbusting era, enforcers joined with organized labor and activists fighting for all kinds of human rights, from universal sufferage to ending Jim Crow, to smash corporate power. Foundational to this fight was the understanding that concentrated corporate power presented a serious danger: first, because of the way that it could corrupt our political process, and second, because of the difficulty of dislodging corporate power once it had been established.

In other words, trustbusters sought to prevent monopolies, not merely to break up monopolies once they were formed. They understood that a company that was too big to fail would also be too big to jail, and that impunity rotted societies from within.

Then came the project to dismantle antitrust and revive the monopolies. Corporatists from the University of Chicago School of Economics and their ultra-wealthy backers launched a multipronged attack on economics, law, and precedent. It was a successful bid to bring back oligarchy and establish a new class of modern aristocracy, whose dynastic fortunes would ensure their rule and the rule of their descendants for generations to come.

A key part of this was an attack on the judiciary. Like other professionals, federal judges are expected to undergo regular "ongoing education" to ensure they're current on the best practices in their field. Wealthy pro-monopolists bankrolled a series of junkets for judges called the "Manne Seminars," all-expenses-paid family trips to luxury resorts, where judges could be indoctrinated with the theory of "efficient monopolies":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

40% of all federal judges attended a Manne Seminar, and empirical studies show that after graduating, these judges changed the way they ruled, to favor monopolies:

https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjaf042/8241352?login=false

The terrible beauty of this strategy is that you don't need to get all the judges into a Manne Seminar – you just need to get enough judges to attend that they will create a wall of precedent that every other judge will feel hemmed in by when they rule on antitrust cases. Those judgments further shore-up the pro-monopoly precedent, setting the stage for the next pro-monopoly judgment, and the next, and the next.

So here we are, a couple generations into the project to brainwash judges, monopolize the economy and establish a new aristocracy, and a judge just ruled that Meta isn't an illegal monopoly, even though Mark Zuckerberg literally put his explicit criminal intent in writing.

What are we to do? Should we despair? Does this mean it's all over?

Not hardly. Reversing 40+ years of pro-monopoly policy was always going to be a slog, with many setbacks on the way. That's why antitrust has historically sought to prevent monopolies. Once monopolies have conquered your economy, getting rid of them is far harder, or, as the joke from eastern Canada goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."

But you have to play the ball where it lies. The fact that Meta can deliberately set out to create a monopoly and still evade judgment is more reason to fight monopolies, not less – it's (more) evidence of just how corrupted and illegitimate our judicial system has become.

We've been here before. The first antitrust laws were passed to do the hard work of smashing existing monopolies, not the relatively easy task of preventing monopolization. Of course: before there is a law, there has to be a crime. Antitrust law was passed because of a monopoly problem, not as a pro-active measure to prevent the problem from arising.

Our forebears smashed monopolies that were, if anything, far more ferocious than Big Tech. They vanquished oligarchs whose perfidy and ruthlessness put today's ketamine-addled zuckermuskian mediocrities in the shade. How they did it is not a mystery: they just put in the hard yards of building coalitions and winning public sentiment.

They did it before and we can do it again. We know how it's done. We remember their names and what they did. Take Ida Tarbell, the slayer of John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Tarbell was a brilliant, fierce writer and orator, fearless and brilliant. She was the first woman in America to get a science degree, and a key driver of the movement for universal suffrage. But in addition to all that, she was an anti-monopolist.

Tarbell's father was a Pennsylvania oil man who'd been ruined by Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Determined to see him avenged, Tarbell researched the many tendrils of Rockefeller's empire and his devious tactics, and laid them bare in a pair of wildly successful serialized books, The History of the Standard Oil Company, Volumes I & II (published first in the popular national magazine Collier's):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/13/a-monopoly-isnt-the-same-as-legitimate-greatness/

Tarbell's History changed the way the country saw Rockefeller. She punctured his myth of brilliance and competence, and showed how he owed his fortune to swindling and cheating. She cut him down to size. She was a key figure in the American trustbusting movement, a catalyst for the revolution that saw Rockefeller and his fellow oligarchs overthrown.

This took a hell of a long time. The Sherman Act (which was used to break up Standard Oil) was passed in 1890, but Standard Oil wasn't broken up until 1912. It took perseverance through setback after setback, it took the compounding tragedies that drove people to question the order and demand change, and it took unglamorous organizing and dramatic street-fights to escape from oligarchy's powerful gravity well.

Today, we are back at square one, but we have advantages that Tarbell and the other trustbusters lacked. For one thing, we have them, the lessons of their fight and the inspiration of their victory. For another, we have the political wind at our back. All over the world, from China to Canada, from the EU to the USA, politicians have felt emboldened (or forced) to launch anti-monopoly efforts the likes of which have not been seen since the Carter administration:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/09/elite-disunity/#awoken-giants

What's more, these enforcers aren't alone – they can and do collaborate. Because these tech companies run the same swindles in every country in the world, enforcers can collaborate on building cases against them. After all the facts of Big Tech's crimes are virtually identical, whether you're in the UK, Singapore, South Korea, Canada or Germany:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

This is an advantage that the trustbusters who took down Rockefeller could only dream of. Like Big Tech, Rockefeller had a global empire, but unlike Big Tech, Rockefeller abused each of the nations of the world in distinct ways. In America, Rockefeller ran the refineries and pipelines; in Germany, he had a stranglehold on the ports.

Even if the Rockefeller-era trustbusters wanted to collaborate, sending memos back and forth across the Atlantic by zeppelin, all they could offer each other was warm wishes. US pipeline investigations had nothing to add to German port investigations.

Today's tech monopolists may be bigger than any one government, but they're not bigger than all the governments whose people they're abusing.

The trustbusters who brought down Rockefeller did something knowable and repeatable. Their work did not arise out of the lost arts of a fallen civilization. The work of taking down today's monopolists requires only that we recover our ancestors' moral fire and perseverance. No one needs to figure out how to build a pyramid without power tools or embalm a Pharaoh.

We merely have to build and sustain a global movement to destroy oligarchy.

(Merely!)

Yes, that's a hell of a big lift. But we're not alone. There are billions of people who suffer under oligarchy and an infinite variety of ways to erode its power, as a prelude to smashing that power. Our allies in antitrust include the voters who put Zohran Mamdani into office, going from less than 1% in the polls to a commanding majority in a three-way race, running on an anti-oligarch platform:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

(No coincidence that one of our most effective fighters is now co-leading Mamdani's transition team):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/15/unconscionability/#standalone-authority

Trustbusting alone will not end oligarchy and trustbusters alone cannot break up the monopolies. As with the original trustbusters, the modern trustbusting movement is but a part of a coalition that wants a world organized around the needs of the many, not the few.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Brit backpackers take Indian call-centre jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20051210103452/http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1284171

#20yrsago Laser etching doesn’t necessarily void your warranty https://web.archive.org/web/20051126194823/http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/11/will_laser_etching_apple_gear.html

#20yrsago UCLA to MPAA shill: ARRRRRRR! https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-18-fi-glickman18-story.html

#20yrsago RIAA prez: Lots of companies secretly install rootkits! It’s no biggie! https://web.archive.org/web/20051125041201/http://www.malbela.com/blog/archives/000375.html

#20yrsago Sony offers MP3s in replacement for rootkit CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20051124233458/https://www.upsrow.com/sonybmg/

#15yrsago TSA forces cancer survivor to remove prosthetic breast https://web.archive.org/web/20101120213044/http://www.wbtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=13534628

#15yrsago How the Victorians wiped their bums https://web.archive.org/web/20101123191021/http://wellcomelibrary.blogspot.com/2010/11/item-of-month-november-2010-victorian.html

#15yrsago Understanding the “microcredit crisis” in Andhra Pradesh https://web.archive.org/web/20101119012652/https://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/11/18/the-lessons-of-andhra-pradesh/

#15yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister inadvertently damns his own copyright bill https://web.archive.org/web/20101121054805/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5456/125/

#15yrsago TSA confiscates heavily-armed soldiers’ nail-clippers https://redstate.com/erick/2010/11/18/another-tsa-outrage-n37064

#15yrsago Chris McKitterick pirates his own book https://mckitterick.livejournal.com/653743.html

#15yrsago Chinese woman kidnapped to labor camp on her wedding day over sarcastic re-Tweet https://web.archive.org/web/20120609051421/http://voices.washingtonpost.com/blog-post/2010/11/chinese_twitter_sentence_a_yea.html

#15yrsago RuneScape devs refuse to cave in to patent trolls https://web.archive.org/web/20101119012943/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/31597/UKBased_RuneScape_Dev_Jagex_Wins_Patent_Infringement_Lawsuit.php

#10yrsago Manhattan DA calls for backdoors in all mobile operating systems https://web.archive.org/web/20151120003032/https://manhattanda.org/sites/default/files/11.18.15

#10yrsago Watching paint dry: epic crowfunded troll of the UK film censorship board https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/charlielyne/make-the-censors-watch-paint-drying?ref=video

#10yrsago CEOs are lucky, tall men https://hbr.org/2015/11/are-successful-ceos-just-lucky

#10yrsago America’s CEOs and hedge funds are starving the nation’s corporations to death https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-buybacks-cannibalized/

#10yrsago EU official: all identified Paris attackers were from the EU https://web.archive.org/web/20151116223023/https://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/11/16/3722838/all-paris-attackers-identified-so-far-are-european-nationals-according-to-top-eu-official/

#10yrsago The Web is pretty great with Javascript turned off https://www.wired.com/2015/11/i-turned-off-javascript-for-a-whole-week-and-it-was-glorious/

#10yrsago If the Paris attackers weren’t using cryptography, the next ones will, and so should you https://insidesources.com/new-york-times-article-blaming-encryption-paris-attacks/

#10yrsago Zero: the number of security experts Ted Koppel consulted for hysterical cyberwar book https://www.techdirt.com/2015/11/19/ted-koppel-writes-entire-book-about-how-hackers-will-take-down-our-electric-grid-never-spoke-to-any-experts/

#10yrsago How a paid FBI informant created a terror plot that sent an activist to jail for 9 years https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/an-fbi-informant-seduced-eric-mcdavid-into-a-bomb-plot-then-the-government-lied-about-it/

#10yrsago Google steps up to defend fair use, will fund Youtubers’ legal defenses https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2015/11/a-step-toward-protecting-fair-use-on.html?m=1

#10yrsago Alan Moore’s advice to unpublished authors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuaWu2uhmRQ

#10yrsago Private funding of public services is bankrupting the UK https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/nhs/11748960/The-PFI-hospitals-costing-NHS-2bn-every-year.html

#10yrsago The US government turned down Anne Frank’s visa application https://www.reuters.com/article/2007/02/14/us-annefrank-letters-idUSN1430569220070214/#HmyajvjLmsX2tVYf.97

#10yrsago Seriously, try “view source” on google.com https://xkcd.com/1605/#10yrsago

#5yrsago Tyson execs bet on covid spread in unsafe plant https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#you-bet-your-life

#5yrsago Disney stiffs writer https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#disneymustpay

#5yrsago Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#asl

#5yrsago Canada's GDPR https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#consent

#5yrsago Telehealth chickenizes docs https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#telehealth

#5yrsago The Mounties lied about social surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#rcmp

#5yrsago Race, surveillance and tech https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#asl

#1yrago Harpercollins wants authors to sign away AI training rights https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/18/rights-without-power/#careful-what-you-wish-for

#1yrago Forcing Google to spin off Chrome (and Android?) https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/19/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#shiny-and-chrome

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

18.11.2025 à 14:54

Pluralistic: Disney lost Roger Rabbit (18 Nov 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4388 mots)


Today's links


The final scene of Disneyland's 'Roger Rabbit's Toontown Spin,' in which Roger Rabbit is deploying a pair of portable holes; the holes have been replaced with copyright symbols, which are partially cropped.

Disney has lost Roger Rabbit (permalink)

Gary K Wolf is the author of a fantastic 1981 novel called Who Censored Roger Rabbit? which Disney licensed and turned into an equally fantastic 1988 live action/animated hybrid movie called Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But despite the commercial and critical acclaim of the movie, Disney hasn't made any feature-length sequels.

This is a nightmare scenario for a creator: you make a piece of work that turns out to be incredibly popular, but you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them. Luckily, the copyright system contains a provision designed to rescue creative workers who fall into this trap: "Termination of Transfer."

"Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office.

Termination is a powerful copyright policy, and unlike most copyright, it solely benefits creative workers and not our bosses. Copyright is a very weak tool for protecting creators' interests, because copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power, which means that copyright becomes something we bargain away.

Think of it this way: for the past 50 years, copyright has only expanded in every direction. Copyright now lasts longer, covers more kinds of works, prohibits more uses without permission, and carries stiffer penalties. The media industry is now larger and more profitable than at any time in history. But at the same time, the amount of money being earned by creative workers has only fallen over this period, both in real terms (how much money an average creative worker brings home) and as a share of the total (what percentage of the revenues from a creator's work the creator gets to keep). How to explain this seeming paradox?

The answer lies in the structure of creative labor markets, which are brutally concentrated. Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks.

The media industry isn't just a monopoly, in other words – it's also a monopsony, which is to say, a collection of powerful buyers. The middlemen who control access to our audiences have all the power, so when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.

In other words, giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money you can give that kid that will buy them lunch – you're just enriching the bullies. Do this for long enough and you'll make the bullies so rich they can buy off the school principal. Keep it up even longer and the bullies will hire an ad agency to run a global campaign bemoaning the plight of the hungry schoolkids and demanding that they be given more lunch money:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism/

This is an argument that Rebecca Giblin and I develop in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back:

https://www.beacon.org/Chokepoint-Capitalism-P1856.aspx

Rebecca is a law professor who is, among other things, one of the world's leading experts on Termination of Transfer, who co-authored the definitive study on the use of Termination since the 1976 Copyright Act, and the many ways this has benefited creators at the expense of media companies:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

Remember, Termination is one of the only copyright policies that solely benefits creative workers. Under Termination, a media company can force you to sign away your rights in perpetuity, but you can still claim those rights back after 35 years. Termination isn't just something to bargain away, it's a new power to bargain with.

The history of how Termination got into the 1976 Copyright Act is pretty gnarly. The original text of the Termination clause made Termination automatic, after 25 years. That would have meant that every quarter century, every media company would have to go hat in hand to every creative worker whose work was still selling and beg them to sign a new contract. If your original contract stank (say, because you were just starting your career), you could demand back-payment to make up for the shitty deal you'd been forced into, and if your publisher/label/studio wouldn't cough up, you could take your work somewhere else and bargain from a position of strength, because you'd be selling a sure thing – a work that was still commercially viable after 25 years!

Automatic termination would also solve the absentee landlord problem, where a media company was squatting on your rights, keeping your book or album in print (or these days, online), but doing nothing to promote them and refusing to return the rights to you so you could sell them to some who saw the potential in your old works.

Naturally, the media industry hated this, so they watered down Termination. Instead of applying after 25 years, it now applies after 35 years. Instead of being automatic, it now requires requires creators to go through red tape at the Copyright Office.

But that wasn't enough for the media companies. In 1999, an obscure Congressional staffer named Mitch Glazier slipped a rider into the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act that ended Termination of Transfer for musicians. Musicians really need Termination, since record deals were and are so unconscionable and one-sided. The bill passed without anyone noticing:

https://www.wired.com/2000/08/rule-reversal-blame-it-on-riaa/

Musicians got really pissed about this, and so did Congress, who'd been hoodwinked by this despicable pismire. Congress actually convened a special session just to delete Glazier's amendment, and Glazier left his government job under a cloud.

But Glazier wasn't unemployed for long. Within three months, he'd been installed as the CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, a job he has held ever since, where he makes over $1.3 million/year:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131669037

I recently got a press release signed by Glazier, supporting Disney and Universal's copyright suit against Midjourney, in which begins, "There is a clear path forward through partnerships":

https://www.riaa.com/riaa-statement-on-midjourney-ai-litigation/

In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods. He wants there to be a new copyright that allows creators to decide whether their work can be used to train AI models, and then he wants that right transferred to media companies who will sell it to AI companies in a bid to stop paying artists:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/19/gander-sauce/#just-because-youre-on-their-side-it-doesnt-mean-theyre-on-your-side

US Copyright has always acknowledged the tension between creators' rights and the rights of publishers, studios, labels and other media companies that buy creators' works. The original US copyright lasted for 14 years, and could be renewed for another 14 years, but only by the creator (not by the publisher). This meant that if a work was still selling after 14 years, the publisher would have to convince the writer to renew the copyright, or the work would go into the public domain.

This was in an era in which writers were typically paid a flat fee for their work, so from a writer's perspective, it didn't matter if the publisher made any money from subsequent sales of their books, or whether the book entered the public domain so that anyone could sell it. The writer made the same amount either way: zero.

Copyright's original 14 year renewal was a way for creative labor markets to look back and address historic injustices. If your publisher underpaid you 14 years ago, you could demand that they make good on their moral obligation to you, and if they refused, you could punish them by putting the work into the public domain.

Termination has been a huge boon to artists of all description from Stephen King to Ann M Martin, creator of The Babysitters' Club. One of my favorite examples is funk legend George Clinton, whose shitweasel manager forged his signature on a contract and stole his royalties for decades (the reason Clinton is still touring isn't merely that he's an unstoppable funk god, but because he's broke). Clinton eventually gave up on suing his ex-manager and instead just filed for Termination of Transfer:

https://www.billboard.com/pro/george-clinton-lawsuit-ex-agent-music-rights/

If that sounds familiar, it may be because I used it as the basis for a subplot in my novel The Bezzle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle/

Back to Roger Rabbit. Author Gary K Wolf has successfully filed for Termination of Transfer, meaning he's recovered the rights to Roger Rabbit and the other characters from his novel:

https://www.imnotbad.com/2025/11/roger-rabbit-copyright-reverts-to.html

He discusses his plans for a sequel starring Jessica Rabbit in this interview with "I'm Not Bad TV":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_0lUiplxZk

Writing about the termination for Boing Boing, Ruben Bolling wonders what this means for things like the Roger Rabbit ride at Disneyland, and the ongoing distribution of the film:

https://boingboing.net/2025/11/17/disney-loses-the-rights-to-roger-rabbit-characters-as-they-revert-to-original-author-of-novel.html

It's not clear to me what the answer is but my guess is that Disney will have to offer Wolf enough money that he agrees to keep the film in distribution and the ride running. Which is the point: when you sell your work for film adaptation, no one know if it's going to be a dud or a classic. Termination is copyright's lookback, a way to renegotiate the deal once you've gotten the leverage that comes from success.

If you have a work you signed away the copyright for 35 years or more ago, here is a tool from Creative Commons and the Authors Alliance for terminating the transfer and getting your rights back (disclosure: I am an unpaid member of the Authors Alliance advisory board):

https://rightsback.org/

(Image: Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Amazon offers refunds for all Sony rootkit CDs https://craphound.com/amznxmpsonycd.txt

#20yrsago Uninstaller for Sony’s other malware screws up your PC https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/11/17/not-again-uninstaller-iotheri-sony-drm-also-opens-huge-security-hole/

#20yrsago Schneier: Why didn’t anti-virus apps defend us against Sony’s rootkit? https://web.archive.org/web/20051124121434/https://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,69601,00.html

#20yrsago Sony still advising public to install rootkits https://web.archive.org/web/20051124053020/https://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/howtouse.html

#15yrsago Hilarious story of disastrous cross-country move with dogs https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/11/dogs-dont-understand-basic-concepts.html

#15yrsago UK gov’t promises to allow telcos to hold Brits hostage on “two-speed” Internet https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11773574

#15yrsago Sexually assaulted by a TSA groper https://web.archive.org/web/20101116004124/https://www.ourlittlechatterboxes.com/2010/11/tsa-sexual-assault.html

#10yrsago Former ISIS hostage: they want us to retaliate https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/16/isis-bombs-hostage-syria-islamic-state-paris-attacks?CMP=share_btn_tw

#10yrsago There is no record of US mass surveillance ever preventing a large terror attack https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/u-s-mass-surveillance-has-no-record-of-thwarting-large-terror-attacks-regardless-of-snowden-leaks/

#10yrsago The final Pratchett: The Shepherd’s Crown https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/17/the-final-pratchett-the-shepherds-crown/

#10yrsago DRM in TIG welders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6mlr_MX2VI

#10yrsago We treat terrorism as more costly than it truly is https://timharford.com/2015/11/nothing-to-fear-but-fear-itself/

#10yrsago David Cameron capitulates to terror, proposes Britain’s USA Patriot Act https://web.archive.org/web/20151117154831/https://thestack.com/security/2015/11/16/cameron-draft-investigatory-powers-bill-timetable-paris/

#5yrsago Storage Wars https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/17/u-stor-it/#nyc

#5yrsago Cross-Media Sci-Fi with Amber Benson and John Rogers https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/17/u-stor-it/#asl

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF
10 / 10
 Persos A à L
Carmine
Mona CHOLLET
Anna COLIN-LEBEDEV
Julien DEVAUREIX
Cory DOCTOROW
Lionel DRICOT (PLOUM)
EDUC.POP.FR
Marc ENDEWELD
Michel GOYA
Hubert GUILLAUD
Gérard FILOCHE
Alain GRANDJEAN
Hacking-Social
Samuel HAYAT
Dana HILLIOT
François HOUSTE
Tagrawla INEQQIQI
Infiltrés (les)
Clément JEANNEAU
Paul JORION
Michel LEPESANT
 
 Persos M à Z
Henri MALER
Christophe MASUTTI
Jean-Luc MÉLENCHON
MONDE DIPLO (Blogs persos)
Richard MONVOISIN
Corinne MOREL-DARLEUX
Timothée PARRIQUE
Thomas PIKETTY
VisionsCarto
Yannis YOULOUNTAS
Michaël ZEMMOUR
LePartisan.info
 
  Numérique
Blog Binaire
Christophe DESCHAMPS
Louis DERRAC
Olivier ERTZSCHEID
Olivier EZRATY
Framablog
Tristan NITOT
Francis PISANI
Irénée RÉGNAULD
Nicolas VIVANT
 
  Collectifs
Arguments
Bondy Blog
Dérivation
Économistes Atterrés
Dissidences
Mr Mondialisation
Palim Psao
Paris-Luttes.info
ROJAVA Info
 
  Créatifs / Art / Fiction
Nicole ESTEROLLE
Julien HERVIEUX
Alessandro PIGNOCCHI
Laura VAZQUEZ
XKCD
🌓