As someone who makes my living from the sequence of words to readers to ads to dollars, I have a proprietary feeling about the words I write. If my writing were worth less, my children might well have to eat hormone-free bacon instead of the organic stuff. (Disclosure: We live modestly.)

I give some of them away freely—if you love some words, let them free—and keep others. The contracts I sign with some publications require that I orphan my words never to see them again. The better contracts allow me to remain in parental custody, offering limited visitation rights to an editor and a publication. (Disclosure: I love my words.)

This gives rise to some conflicting internal monologues about how tightly controlled words I write must be. Tight control via digital rights management (DRM)—a combination of encryption with special software on a computer or device that allows limited access—benefits me as a content creator, horrible phrase that, while also acting to my detriment in that role and as a consumer or participant in media.

These monologues turned briefly into a dialog when I read Corynne McSherry's blog entry at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "The Kindle Lawsuit: Protecting Readers From Future Abuses ." (Disclosure: I do not hear voices.)

The EFF has made a long history of preventing corporations and governments from eroding personal liberty and rights in the digital and online realms. (Disclosure: I was one of five model plaintiffs in EFF's Newmark v Turner suit over the right to time and space shift digital television records. Yes, it was that Newmark.)

McSherry, an attorney at EFF, writes here about the Kindle kerfuffle, where Amazon removed copies of books it had sold incorrectly—the publisher lacked the rights to two books by George Orwell—from the downloaded storage on users' Kindles. I wrote about this at PubliCola back on July 24.

McSherry notes a class-action lawsuit led by a kid whose notes on "1984" were deleted when his 99-cent copy of the book went away. She wants Amazon to change its tune beyond CEO Jeff Bezos's statement that the company made errors and won't do this again in this fashion. (Disclosure: I worked for Amazon in 1996 and 1997, sometimes quite closely with Jeff, but left the firm unbeholden to it or my former colleagues.)

McSherry beleives that for Amazon to do the right things for readers it needs to match the privacy policies of bookstore and libraries, remove tracking information, and disable the ability to act remotely on Kindles (no forced software updates, no remote removals of books).

But most importantly for me, she wants DRM removed from electronic editions of books, and have those books sold, not licensed. In my PubliCola piece referenced above, I explain that most digital media isn't yours; you're given very specific rights that can often be revoked.

McSherry writes, "Amazon should respond to customer expectations by adding language to clarify that all books, magazines and newspapers are not licensed but rather sold, and may be disposed of at the purchaser’s discretion."

I'm a digital guy, but I still find McSherry's idea scary. Once DRM is removed from a work, and it's sold in that fashion, the genie is out of the bottle and there's no stopping its illegal distribution, along with any legal uses.

But I need to get over my fear. As a fiction and non-fiction writer friend has told me for years, if you can read it, it can be copied perfectly. Ebooks are read on screens, and someone can create a perfect duplicate merely by typing. (Fluent English speakers in developing nations already earn money performing human OCR: typing in printed material to avoid the limitations of computer optical character recognition.)

It's inevitable that any ebook could be purchased once typed in from the screen, and then distributed freely, thus, just like the music industry got over DRM, why shouldn't authors?

(This already happens with print books, just like audio CDs, where Harry Potter's seven installment was on Web sites within hours of its print release, followed by samizdat translated versions.)

Let me back up a second, and explain a bit more about DRM, though, and it why it generally freaks out rightsholders and trade association.

Because digitally encoded media, whether a book or a movie, is a perfect copy of the original, encryption wraps the media in such a way that only a special tool with the right key can unlock the media to read, view, or play it.

The intent of DRM is to prevent one person from buying a downloaded version of Spiderman 3 and then allowing one billion people to make a copy. But the film, movie, book, and game industries are never content to take just a little.

Instead of acting as a kind of warning tap, DRM is a blow from Thor's hammer. In most forms, DRM restricts your ability to use media you've purchased in ways that are completely legal and appropriate.

Imagine that in order to read a hardcover book, you'd have to first let a bookstore install a special tiny room in your house big enough for just one person and with no windows. Every book you purchased would have a key attached to the cover to open that room. But only after you were inside the room and had locked the door could you reach the key in the room that temporarily unlocked the book to read it. And every bookstore would need to put a different room in your house.

Sure, some bookstores might be liberal, and install a special room (at no charge, naturally) in every room in your house, or build a room big enough to fit your home family. But you're still locked inside that room, reading the book according to the desires of the bookstore and book publisher.

Would it be any wonder in this scenario that people would pick the locks on book covers and tell others how to do the same? But then bookstores would require that to continue buying books you'd have to let them change the locks in the tiny rooms regularly. And so on.

In the case of ebooks, which tend to be from hundreds of kilobytes to a few megabytes in size, they are much more transportable via email and memory sticks and other means than music libraries (versus individual songs) and downloaded videos or ripped DVDs.

I've long thought that we needed a federated DRM system, that would allow someone to register a family's worth of devices in a simple fashion; that DRM would function to confirm your honesty instead of brand you a thief. But even the simplest DRM infrastructure to allow that is likely more complicated than most human beings want to deal with.

That's one of the reasons that digital music was so often ripped and sent around. Digital restrictions were so ugly, sometimes erratic, and limited beyond reason—far beyond what the law requires or allows—that people took the path of least resistance.

After years of this, the music industry caved. All music sold (as opposed to the subscription services) by Apple, Microsoft, Walmart, and Amazon is DRM-free: There's the recognition that it's so easy to pull DRM off, that music ought to be sold that way.

So why not books? I've been writing ebooks for the Take Control book series, titles about Mac OS X software and wireless networking, for several years. I've sold something north of 25,000 copies across all the titles I've written.

These books are sold without DRM as PDFs. People can email them or upload them or share them one to another; the only discouragement is a message on the cover that explains these books have a price attached. The books even note that it's fine to share a copy with a friend with the expectation that the friend will purchase a copy if they find it useful.

The publisher is approaching 200,000 books sold, and I and other authors have found the direct relationship with readers we have through the book, the higher royalty relative to cover price, and other factors very rewarding.

But can this scale? Can Stephen King's publisher let Amazon and others sell ebooks with no protection? Will millions of people just take copies, figuring he's rich enough; or does the ease of getting a copy for free make it more likely that someone will pay for it, and even expand sales?

Sci-fi author and BoingBoing blogger Cory Doctorow has become a best-selling author partly through giving his books away for free. He even offers up subsidiary rights, letting people create plays and movies and audio books from his writing without arranging permission or paying him fees. He may be particular, and he has a vast audience to promote his work through BoingBoing readers as well.

In the end, someone has to blink. Amazon, Barnes & Noble (a recent ebook market entrant), Google, and others will all be contending for consumer dollars from ebooks. With music, it took Amazon launching a no-DRM marketplace for music to push everyone over the edge, although enabled by music labels who wanted to crack Apple's hegemony in selling digital music.

Publishers have to sign onto this brave new world, but once the dam cracks, demand may cause it to break.