Here's my latest rant, a piece aimed at exhorting writers to align themselves with people who break the encryption on e-books instead of the people who prosecute them.
How, then, do we earn our living off of our work? When publishing inevitably includes an electronic edition, when unprotected copies of our work circulate freely, how do we compel readers to pay for our time and so keep a roof over our heads?
There are a couple possibilities: The first, of course, is that we can't. The world doesn't owe us a living. This may even serve copyright's goal — the production of lots of creative material. After all, the vast majority of science fiction writers *don't* earn a living writing, but they do it anyway. Demanding recompense for your work when no one is willing to pay for it is rarely a productive strategy — just ask a squeegee kid. It's possible that eliminating recompense for writing will barely affect the volume of material available: the fact that science fiction magazines are still drowning in great story submissions while paying the same word rates they offered in the 1930s sure suggests this.
