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Excerpt from the BBC:
"...Mr Doctorow has summed up his beliefs into three rules for digital survival. The first deals with DRM.
"Anytime that someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you but won't give you the key, that lock's not there for you."
Locking your content away behind a vendor's proprietory DRM technology can leave you trapped, as the vendor - be it iTunes, Amazon, or the like - has control.
Radiohead asked fans to pay what the felt their album, In Rainbows, was worth
"When another company comes along with a better distribution offer, if you want to go there you've got to trust your audience to throw away all the media they've bought from you, and buy it again on the new platform.
"You can't authorise them to take off the anti-copying stuff and convert it."
He mentions the inventor of the spreadsheet, Dan Bricklin, who included anti-copyright technology in his software. After selling the company he found that he couldn't read his own spreadsheets.
"People who've found themselves locked into these distribution channels not by contract but by technology often wish they'd make a better decision some time ago."
Bigger audience
His second rule deals with finding a customer base.
"It's very hard to monetise fame, but it's impossible to monetise obscurity."
Mr Doctorow says that by giving away his books for free he has managed to build a bigger audience, many of whom subsequently buy books.
"Obscurity means that no one will pay you anything. No one's figured out how to become a successful artist that no ones ever heard."
He uses the musician Jonathan Coulton as an example. All of the artist's music is released under a Creative Commons licence. Projects like "Thing a week", where he recorded and released a song a week on Youtube, built a fanbase.
"He's now a very successful touring musician, whose audience is built on the back of freely sharing his work."
Finally, he says, DRM technology has the potential to be abused.
"Designing phones, for example, that can run software in the background that's supposed to stop you from copying music also allows repressive governments to run software that monitors how you use the phone.
"So what we really need is to embrace open technology not just because it's good for the creative arts, but because the alternative is building an information society that has woven into it's fabric control technology that turns the promise of technology as liberator, to a real threat of technology as an enslaver."
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