Until now publishers rewarded writers on a sliding scale: the more copies sold, the more the writer earnt.
Digital Rights Management could be seen as a way to track the published copies for honest royalty purposes. However, because DRM does not prevent piracy it cannot track all the copies of a file. Putting DRM on a book does not ensure proper payment for either the writer or the publisher.
An illustration:
There is no legitimate e-book version of Curse & Berate in 69+ Languages. Those copies are all pirated; the publishers and editors make nothing from them. I don't think there was an e-book clause in the contract; if there was, we removed it, wanting to deal with that separately. Several major illnesses & one merger & acquisition later, we still haven't broached the matter – firstly, the creators and publishers have been pre-empted by the pirates, and secondly, the creators need to get other projects done. GobQ is a very small operation.
For very small-scale operations, piracy really does matter: it does the producers – the writer/editors, the small publishers – out of income that is significant on that economic scale.
As Doctorow says, DRM essentially locks a customer into a particular supply-chain, and this has nothing to do with paying the writer or covering the costs of production and publication. All DRM does is limit the number of copies the less technologically-savvy can access. It creates an artificial scarcity in certain paying segments of the market. DRM exists to make the e-world mimic the hard-copy world and so maintain old (read mega-corporate) commercial structures.
The real question is how to compensate writers and publishers. The answer seems to me to lie in moving away from the per-copy model.
The trouble is we don't know what to replace it with.
Homework: What would happen if Stephen King made no more than, say, Tom Spanbauer? What would that world look like? How would attitudes to writers and writing and publishing change? What would happen to the book trade?
(Due Fri. Sept. 24, at 5 p.m. No extensions.)
