[Amezarak]

> If that were the case then each copy would need to sell for thousands of dollars for content creators to afford food.

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.

[forrestthewoods]

> I doubt it's really much more than the number of sales now

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.

[Amezarak]

The people that would borrow the game from the library to play it might at best pirate it if they couldn’t get it from the library. Maybe they’d pay a few bucks tops rather than $60-80. Library game borrowers are not big game buyers in the first place.

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.

[forrestthewoods]

If your goal is to prevent orphaned works there's much better and more targeted changes that could be made to the law! Don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

> 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!

[pastage]

IA did not charge nor did they get revenue from their users in other ways. They did have a system to handle borrowing and make it cumbersome to read stuff. That is an important distinction.

[rockskon]

Steam effectively implemented digital game borrowing years ago. Works just fine.