> If your whole point is that we could tear down all of copyright law and replace it
No, no, not at all.
In this situation I just want to change the definition of "copy" slightly.
(And to point out that slightly different definitions of terms would make libraries illegal. There's nothing special about the current definitions. In particular they're not the most straightforward definitions at all. Again, none of this is about radical change, just looking at where small tweaks would get us.)
There is no reasonable definition of "copy" that would make the lending of a physical book a copy. The word "copy" literally exists to differentiate other actions from that action.
> There is no reasonable definition of "copy" that would make the lending of a physical book a copy.
But it could count as distribution. Copyright covers that. Library style distribution could be just as illegal as CDL style copying, by barely changing anything.
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It is however not much a stretch to say that someone reading a book and committing it to memory is making a copy not inherently different from the "copies" being made when viewing something over the Internet. Now if you go and lend/sell a book after reading it you still retain the copy in your mind. Yet somehow that is legally fine.