[WorldMaker]

I'm more afraid that uptake of subscription services will hit that worst case scenario problem of prolonging the fight just long enough that people give up on the fight in a war of attrition before subscription services simply prove again why (digital) landlords cannot be trusted and (digital) renters have no rights.

A big part of my concern here is that copyright terms are so long today that any subscription/rental-focused world is a multi-generational digital feudalism. With a larger and "closer" to the current generation public domain it might be much easier to trust competition among subscription companies. You allude to this indirectly in trying to open the market, but there will always be "exclusive" distribution rights so long as copyright casts such a long shadow from the big castles on all the lowly consumer sharecroppers.

While I doubt we'd see much legislative interest in shortening copyright terms and enlarging the public domain, fighting for digital asset rights from digital retailers that use words like "own" and "purchase", given long histories of consumer protection laws and consumer protection court cases, seems a lot more plausible, and a lot more worth fighting. I worry that a lot of people won't care to fight so long as the castles make subscription services seem like good sharecropping just long enough for most people to give up, and then it will be too late and there won't be a big enough public domain to protect us.