In the first part of a Daily Cross Hatch interview, Cory Doctorow explains how he’s convinced IDW Publishing to do a collection of his short stories adapted for comic books and distribute it under a Creative Commons license:
“When the trade comes out, we’re going to put the whole thing online, in hi-res PDFs. Then we’re going to license it in a way that allows people to make non-commercial, derivative work. So you can copy it as much as you’d like, as long you’re not charging for those copies. You can make 100 million-billion copies, and e-mail them to all of your friends. You can put it online, you can link to it on your blog, you can paste it into your IM session, you can attach it to a message and send it to a mailing list with 50,000 people on it… [Y]ou can cut up the comics and put them back together again with Photoshop and InDesign, or whatever, and turn them into a parody of the comics, or be mean to me with them, or make fan art, or continue the stories, or tell an entirely new story, using bits and pieces of it.”
“The new thing is not the copying and the sharing,” he says of his approach. “It’s pretty much the way that fandom has always worked, handing books around, reading them to each other, doing dramatic readings at conventions, writing fanfiction in elementary school, sitting down and writing your own Star Wars sequel, when you’re six-years-old. All of that stuff is as old as culture itself.”
(As for why Doctorow’s dressed like that, it’s a sublime case of life imitating art.)