Even if that were the case I don’t think it’s acceptable.
Physical used goods have limitations on transfer rate. If you want a used book you have to go to the store. Or have it shipped across the country.
I adamantly oppose a global digital pool with instantaneous transfers. In that world you never need to sell more than peak concurrent users. If that were the case then each copy would need to sell for thousands of dollars for content creators to afford food.
The same argument applies to “used” digital movies and games. It’s nonsense.
We have an enormous surplus of content creators and most of the content is not very good. I don't see why we need to structure our economic system such that people must be able to making a living churning out mediocre scifi/romance/mystery novels. If they can, great, but I don't think that's the goal we should be aiming for with copyright. There would still be plenty of novels turned out every year even if copyright did not exist.
> In that world you never need to sell more than peak concurrent users.
That sounds good to me, and I doubt it's really much more than the number of sales now. Many/most people would still buy their own copy anyway, just as they do today when a new book comes out.
Copyright law as structured today is destroying more art than saving it; the number of out-of-print but copyrighted works that are vanishing from human knowledge is astronomical.
Yikes. I can not possibly disrespectfully disagree more with everything you said.
Baldur's Gate 3 has sold about 15 million copies. It's peak concurrent user count on Steam is 875,343. A difference of about 20x that will continue to grow as BG3 will sell meaningful copies over the next 10 years.
Limiting sales to peak CCU is categorically insane. And deeply illogical.
And yes I am talking about a video game because the copyright laws for books and games are the same. I would expect the CCU/sales ratio for most successful books to be even larger than that of games which have a much more hyped launch day.
Games can and do already get around this anyway via software, if you want to argue the laws should work differently for them then I’m open to that, but I also don’t think games matter enough on a societal scale that we should tolerate current copyright laws in order to protect video game studios over the long tail of disappearing orphaned works.
> Library game borrowers are not big game buyers in the first place.
That's because today there is effectively no such thing as digital game borrowing. If there were then there would be a platform that seamlessly grants and revokes licenses on application startup/shutdown.
People just want things cheaply. Why pay $60 for a game when AmezarakGamesStore lets you play for just $5? People used to buy used discs from GameStop for $55 instead of buying a new copy for $60. Consumers don't care. They justifiably just want to spend the minimum amount of money necessary!
Libraries do not serve the interest of publishers (and let's just focus on publishers because if we're being real here, publishers are the ones who stand to lose money - "think of the authors" is just a distraction)... i digress, Libraries exist as a benefit to society, they aren't supposed to neatly fit into absolutist capitalist ideals.
No. I'm focusing on all media - books, tv, movies, games, etc. It's one set of copyright laws.
> so are physical libraries also nonsense?
Copyright strikes a balance of rights between content creators/owners and content consumers. Physical libraries with the limitations of physical transfer strike are a reasonable balance. A global digital pool with instantaneous and unlimited transfer of non-degradable goods does not strike a reasonable balance.
That's a more interesting argument. I think it's valid, abstractly at least.
> Copyright strikes a balance of rights between content creators/owners and content consumers
Originally sought to, perhaps. However copyright has devolved into almost entirely serving the interests of the transferred owner who are overwhelmingly huge publishers.
It makes sense to me that a digital library poses an existential threat to the business model of those large publishers who have gradually moved away from obtaining or encouraging the creation of new original works (the original intention of copyright) to reselling and repackaging existing content over and over again. This is why things like DRM exist, not to prevent piracy, but one one many mechanisms serving this strategy by controlling how ordinary consumers can consume what they "bought", when, where, on what, for how long... so many types of restrictions all serving to extract the maximum economic return for each original piece of work they own - A library completely undermines that strategy, because it necessarily removes most of those mechanisms to function.
Not at all. Creators have no ihnerent rights that need to be balanced. Copyright is only granted with the argument that encouraging creation benefits society. That is the only argument for its existence.