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!