[vel0city]

> It exists because you have an ownership interest in that copy of the book and copyright law has to respect your physical ownership of that property.

Right, copyright law needs to respect your ownership of that physical property. That bound collection of paper. That stamped piece of vinyl. That reel of magnetic tape. That plastic disc. The copyright protects the ideas and creative stuff on that medium, but not the actual medium itself. You don't actually own any of the ideas that medium contains, but you do own the actual medium.

But what property do you actually own when you "buy" a digitally distributed work? What is the "that" in this case? A collection of bits that are indistinguishable from every other copy of the file? Isn't that what is actually copyrighted, and not the "that"?

[kmeisthax]

Speaking purely in the realm of Law, and what arguments will get past a court, "buying" a digitally distributed work does not confer any ownership. At the bare minimum, what is actually being purchased when you buy a digitally distributed work is a combination of a license and a service. They transmit the work to you, and you have a license to copy that transmission and store it indefinitely, for your own use. There is no "that" being sold, you are making all the copies yourself, so you need permission to make those copies. And permission cannot be resold.

In the law, a "license" is just permission from a copyright holder to do something. There are no standard terms like there is with a "sale", because licenses are usually tied to a contract[0]. And contracts can have really arbitrary provisions[3]. For example, fair use says you don't need permission from a copyright holder in order to review a game. But if that game is only available digitally, the copyright owner solely dictates the terms upon which the game is sold, through contracts and licensing. And that contract could absolutely just say "you agree not to review the game in exchange for permission to copy the game to your hard drive and RAM[4]", in which case there is no fair use anymore. In fact, Oracle already did this[1].

The law has no counter to this because, for the vast majority of copyright case law history, nobody needed permission to purchase a physical copy of a creative work[5]. Physical media has very well established consumer rights that were codified back when copyright law wasn't nearly as blatant a power grab. Digital is very recent, and copyright law has gotten significantly stricter. It's often said that "the law needs to catch up to technology", but that usually gets said in the context of "I thought of this cool little excuse to not get permission[2] but the court won't agree". Where technology really outflanks the law is in inventing new ways to strip consumers of their rights, by turning things that didn't need permission into things that now do.

[0] US law only. In other countries licenses are treated as separate from contracts, but this is mainly something plaintiff lawyers have to remember when drafting complaints, since "doing something without permission" is copyright infringement but "getting permission, but not fulfilling your end of the bargain" is breach of contract here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#DeWitt_Clause

[2] Which will never be granted, mind

[3] The only real restriction on contracts being that you can't literally sell yourself into chattel slavery. BTW, in unrelated news, never upload your brain into a computer if you happen to like the 13th Amendment.

[4] DON'T GET ME STARTED ON MAI SYSTEMS CORP VS PEAK COMPUTER INC

[5] Thomas Edison tried.

[vel0city]

I agree with pretty much everything you said here. However, I'm kind of hoping my comment would draw out more on this idea.

> Speaking purely in the realm of Law

Let's argue this from the basis of expanding the ideas of copyright to something newer and better for this digital age. As mentioned, these days we're really just buying licenses. How do we better define property rights with this new(ish) concept of ownership to help individuals continue to have useful rights while not just suggesting copyright overall is now meaningless and creators no longer have any protections? Do we codify some basic rights of ownership around what a license is, what it means, and how one transfers ownership of it?

[BlueTemplar]

Speaking of property-adjacent rights, there's this tricky ongoing legal battle :

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

[kmeisthax]

Good question. While I personally would not consider "suggesting copyright overall is now meaningless" to be a failure[0], there's no way in hell anything that might even remotely harm industry revenue would ever make it through Congress, European Parliament, and/or the Japanese Diet; much less survive challenges in the court or WTO. So the only reforms I can actually suggest are marginal things like this.

Anyway.

First you need to legally define the kinds of licenses we care about. There's a bunch of very good reasons why permission can't be sold, so we want to make it clear that we're only talking about things that function like a sale. That is, one-time purchases of works that are downloaded to a device and whose license grants fall within normal use of that work. This is the sort of thing that needs to be drafted water-tight because the industry absolutely will search for excuses to not comply with the law.

Second, we need to define how a transfer can be done and who needs to honor it. This has per-work and per-service considerations, especially in games[1], which have anticheat and toxic player removal. There are times where a copyright owner has a legitimate interest in taking away the thing you bought because you are ruining the experience for everyone else. So we need carveouts for our carveouts, both of which need to be carefully drafted to not interfere with anticheat.

And this is only considering digital-to-digital first sale. That's easy to do because the systems already exist to revoke and delete your ownership over digital copies of works; you just aren't allowed to use them for first sale purposes. We're ultimately just dictating that certain kinds of DRM license files have a legal mechanism to transfer between owners.

Physical-to-digital schemes like the IA's Controlled Digital Lending pose an additional problem: there's nothing to physically enforce the destruction or disabling of the physical copy when you convert it to a digital one and lend it. The book doesn't refuse to open because someone has it open in Adobe Editions. Everything is done on the honor system and there's massive incentives to cheat CDL. The discovery on the IA lawsuit showed that they basically had never complied with their own legal theory. They had partner libraries who were counting copies of books as digitally loanable without actually taking them out of circulation, and when IA had discovered this on their own, they never did anything to take that library out of the system.

An actually legal CDL regime would need infrastructure to support itself. I'm talking legally qualified DRM banks that could lock up or burn books in exchange for DRM limited files that accurately represented the time in which the physical side of the book was inaccessible. That's... still extremely complicated. Actually, screw CDL. If we're talking about amending the law, there is a far easier way to go about fixing the problem with ebook lending: Book Communism!

Compulsory licensing is a scheme in which the government sets the price of a specific kind of copyright license. If you pay that amount of money to the copyright owner, you automatically have that permission, they can't say no. Naturally, copyright owners would liken this to theft, but they thought your dad's VCR was a home-invading rapist[2], so I don't consider their opinions on the subject to be meaningful. The idea is actually pretty straightforward: having a government-set license price makes licensing a lot more straightforward. Creative work owners can't make silly demands of users or withhold shit because their """strategy""" that quarter was to keep something off the market or sell exclusivity[3].

The specific imbalance that IA tried to fix with CDL is that libraries, being public services run by local governments, do not have negotiating leverage for favorable ebook lending terms with major publishers. "Just lend out physical books digitally" fixes the problem for libraries but the infrastructure needed to make this not unfair to authors or publishers is silly. Why can't we just have the federal government say, OK, we'll sell licenses in which any library can pay $X to the owner of a given book and then digitally lend it out Y times or for Z days? The Copyright Office or some administrative judge can determine fair values for X, Y, and Z.

[0] For one thing, if you are a small artist, you effectively do not have copyright protection because the enforcement costs for a single infringer greatly exceed your total revenues. Copyright is already a failed system.

[1] For example, if reselling whole accounts is legal, then I can buy hundreds of accounts, play the game I want to cheat in on each one, and switch accounts whenever I get banned.

If reselling individual licenses is legal, then after I get banned, I can resell the license - which continues to remain valid - and get my money back so I can repurchase the game on a new account with a fake identity.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Valenti#Valenti_on_new_te...

[3] A related wrinkle in the CDL story is that publishers really, really hate libraries. Not because they let people read books for free - in fact, library circulation is actually really good advertising for sequels that won't hit libraries right away. The problem is that libraries are run by book fans, so they're going to recommend books they like, not what the publisher needs to sell that month.

[MrDrMcCoy]

I've always liked the idea of moving to compulsory licensing for patents so we can have things like day-1 generic drugs and an end to IP-squatting, so am definitely interested in further exploring similar mechanisms for copyright. What would it mean for the government to set prices? Works of similar classification may have a wide array of quality and utility, and thus suggest different pricing. Compulsory licensing for patents would not require government pricing, since they could instead mandate a percentage of profits be assigned to the pattentee.

I am skeptical of government bodies having the agility to appropriately respond to market needs in a timely and equitable fashion, since they've done such a bad job with the rules in every other area. This is not to say that it can't or shouldn't be done, but definitely deserves careful consideration. What mechanisms do you imagine might keep such a system functioning healthily?

[BlueTemplar]

Screw anticheat too, it's even worse than DRM : an even more invasive software for an even more anecdotic use.