He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books.

Both fled Nazi Germany's advance eastward during World War II, and as a result Doctorow's father was born in a displaced persons camp near Baku, Azerbaijan.

[14] In June 1999, Doctorow co-founded the free software P2P company Opencola[15] with John Henson and Grad Conn, which was sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario, in the summer of 2003.

The professorship included a one-year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, United States.

In 2007, together with Austrian art group monochrom, he initiated the Instant Blitz Copy Fight project, which asks people from all over the world to take flash pictures of copyright warnings in movie theaters.

[30][31] On 31 October 2005, Doctorow was involved in a controversy concerning digital rights management with Sony-BMG, as told in Wikinomics, a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D.

[2] In February 2004, it was re-released with a different Creative Commons license that allowed derivative works such as fan fiction, but still prohibited commercial usage.

[9] The novel is available free on the author's website as a Creative Commons download, and is also published in traditional paper format by Tor Books.

It is a project to demonstrate the profitability of Doctorow's method of releasing his books in print and subsequently for free under Creative Commons.

[55] In March 2019, Doctorow released Radicalized, a collection of four self-contained science-fiction novellas dealing with how life in America could be in the near future.

[60] Standalone hopepunk novel The Lost Cause, set in 2050s California about mitigating and surviving climate change impacts amidst the legacy of contemporary political divisions, was published in November 2023.

[61] A second novel featuring forensic accountant Martin Hench was published in February 2024: The Bezzle is centered around the financial (mis-)management of privately owned prisons.

[65] Doctorow contributed the foreword to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a.

[69] He is the originator of Doctorow's Law: "Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit.

[77] Doctorow is an opponent of digital rights management and claims that it limits the free sharing of digital media and frequently causes problems for legitimate users (including registration problems that lock users out of their own purchases and prevent them from being able to move their media to other devices).

"[80] In criticising the decay in usefulness of online platforms, Doctorow coined the neologism enshittification,[81] which he defines as a degradation of an online environment caused by greed: Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

[82]The word gained traction in 2023, where it was used by a variety of sources in reference to several major platforms discontinuing free features in order to further their monetization or taking other actions that were seen to degrade functionality.

[84][85] In November 2024, the Australian Macquarie Dictionary selected it as its word of the year, defining it as follows:[86] The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.The webcomic xkcd has occasionally featured a partially fictional version of Doctorow who lives in a hot air balloon up in the "blogosphere" ("above the tag clouds") and wears a red cape and goggles, such as in the comic "Blagofaire".

"[89] The comedic role-playing game Kingdom of Loathing features a boss-fight against a monster named Doctor Oh, who is described as wearing a red cape and goggles.

The commentary before the fight and assorted hit, miss and fumble messages during the battle make reference to Doctorow's advocacy for open-source sharing and freedom of media.