My pal and mentor James Patrick Kelly is a Hugo-award-winning science fiction writer and the Internet columnist for Asimov's science fiction magazine. Last spring, we did a long interview about DRM, ebooks, Creative Commons and the future of reading and copyright. Jim has turned that conversation into a pair of excellent columns aimed at explaining this stuff to his lay audience, and the second one just hit the net and the newstands.
Are DRM schemes hurting my career? I suppose the answer depends on how one defines a career. Is my career the business model though which I earn the princely sums (not!) that I am paid to commit prose in public? Is my career the collection of all the sentences I have ever typed that have gone on to be published, either in ink or in digits, even if they are now out of print? Is it the size of my readership, even if many of you have just stumbled across my stuff here in the pages of Asimov's? Or is it my reputation among readers who remember my work and would look for more Kelly stories if they weren't too hard to acquire?
The way I see it, readers and rep are what really matter to a writer. Dollars should follow from a satisfied readership, although exactly how this happens in these times of technological and economic innovation is not immediately apparent, alas. I do believe that the net has irretrievably compromised twentieth-century notions of intellectual property and that no amount of DRM shenanigans is going to turn back the copyright clock.
(Thanks, Jim!)
