Cory Doctorow fair use arguments are not hard to find, but his latest Pluralistic essay puts a sharper point on them: asking permission can be the thing that turns a harmless or already permitted use into a formal no.
Doctorow, the author and activist behind Pluralistic, wrote on July 31 that copyright users have become too deferential to permission culture. His target was not Creative Commons itself, which he praised, but the habit of treating every interaction with copyrighted work as something that must pass through an author, publisher or lawyer.
Doctorow said he has supported Creative Commons from its beginning and described spending time with Lisa Rein, Matt Haughey and Aaron Swartz while the first version of the Creative Commons website was being built. He also said his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was the first professionally published text released under a Creative Commons license, shortly after the organization launched.
What did Cory Doctorow say about fair use?
Doctorow argued that copyright does not give rightsholders total control over every use of a work. He pointed to fair use, first sale and the de minimis principle as examples of limits and exceptions that let people use copyrighted material without asking, even when a rightsholder would prefer otherwise.
Fair use, as Doctorow described it, depends heavily on the facts of a particular dispute. He cited the usual four factors: the purpose of the use, the nature of the original work, the amount taken and the effect on the market for the original. He warned against treating those factors like a mechanical checklist.
To show how messy that analysis can get, Doctorow discussed The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall’s novel that retold Gone With the Wind from the viewpoint of enslaved people. The court sided with The Wind Done Gone, despite the book drawing heavily from the earlier novel and criticizing it in a way that could affect its market.
Doctorow also pointed to first sale, the doctrine that allows people to resell copyrighted goods such as books and records after buying them. He added that some uses are too small for the law to care about, using de minimis as the legal label for trivial acts that should not need a full fair use fight.
Why Creative Commons does not replace copyright limits
Doctorow credited Creative Commons with making permission easier to grant. Standard licenses, he wrote, let creators authorize uses without hiring lawyers to draft custom contracts for every remix, adaptation or reuse. He described that standardization as especially useful across borders and media formats.
His concern is the social habit that grew around licensing. Doctorow wrote that people often ask him whether they may do things his Creative Commons licenses already allow. He said those emails force him to check whether the sender is asking for something beyond the license, which wastes time for both sides.
He also described requests that he believes fall under fair use or are too minor to need permission, such as reading a short excerpt from one of his books in a YouTube video or quoting a story in an English exam. Treating those acts as permission-dependent, he argued, risks making restrictive norms feel normal.
Why asking can create a problem
The sharper part of Doctorow’s essay concerned uses that may technically infringe copyright but are unlikely to be noticed. He gave examples such as a tiny bootleg edition for an anarchist book fair or a school posting excerpts from one of his DRM-free books on a classroom intranet.
Doctorow said he cannot authorize those uses because of contracts with his publishers. If someone asks him, he said, he may have to involve an editor or publisher, and the answer will become a formal refusal. His point was procedural and rather bleak: once a questionable use is escalated into the permission machine, the machine is built to say no.
He did not present that as legal advice. Doctorow said he is not a lawyer and cannot tell readers which uses are safe, which might trigger a threatening letter and which might lead to court. He also said he spends time fighting commercial bootlegs of his books on Amazon, Audible and through Ingram’s takedown process.
The line he drew is narrower than a piracy manifesto and broader than a permissions FAQ. Creative Commons licenses matter, he argued, but so do the public’s rights to quote, criticize, resell, teach, parody and make trivial uses without knocking on the rightsholder’s door first.
This story draws on original reporting from Pluralistic.
