Digital Rights Management (Publishing)

What is Digital Rights Management?

If you've ever bought a videogame, movie, or music CD, you know about copy-protection. It's that annoying little thing that makes your life that much more inconvenient. Yeah, I copy stuff, I copy it like crazy, but you know what? Illegal copying ususally creates profit to small-time people.

The best example I've seen is Neil Gaiman talking about Copyright Piracy in this video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI It's a quiet video, and the sound quality isn't that good, but it's worth a watch.

He talks about favorite books, and people loaning them out. I've got a list of my own that, when I read the book, I went out and bought a copy:

Feed, by M.T. Anderson
13 Days to Midnight, by Patrick Carman
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
The Host, by Stephanie Meyer (and I never would have read it otherwise)
Song of the Lioness series, by Tamora Pierce
Divergent, by Veronica Roth

These are just the ones given to me that I've thourally enjoyed. I loan my books out quite a bit to friends and family, and they've, in turn, bought copies.

Cory Doctorow also has a good point about piracy, mentioning Piracy versus Obscurity: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/

Obscurity is my biggest threat, copies of my novel selling dismally slow, if at all some weeks. DRM is the only one-time option on Amazon's publishing options, and I have it turned off. Even if Dusted was selling like crazy I still wouldn't have DRM on because, from my own experiences, nothing is more frustrating than a tough-cookie copy-protected anything.

So, I'm proud to announce that anything I sell will never, ever have DRM so long as that option is in my power.