Say what? Cory Doctorow extols virtues of BugMeNot

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing co-editor and Creative Commons-published science fiction author, was one of the featured speakers at Google's "Unbound" conference--a set of lectures and panels about the state of book publishing in the digital world--held Thursday at the iconic New York Public Library.

Doctorow, well known on the Internet as a foe of traditional copyright laws, took a moment out of his half-hour talk to make some thought-provoking jabs at print newspapers' online editions.

"I use BugMeNot," he declared proudly, referring to the Web service that indexes bogus usernames and passwords to allow Web users to circumvent compulsory registration at news sites like the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. "I think that it's critical to a democracy that we be able to read the news anonymously. I don't think that you should have to register with a central repository to know what's going on in the world."

Phrasing it that way, the whole concept does sound kind of Orwellian.

Doctorow went on to express his opinion of online newspaper sites that make current content free but charge a fee to users who want to access the archives. "Whoever decided that old newspapers were the valuable things and new newspapers were the thing to give away?" he asked the audience. "It's so bizarre."