[inigyou]

So they avoided having a "rent" button by using the technically correct "add to cart", "continue to payment" instead of "buy this game", "buy all games in cart", and just have a separate sentence in small grey text that is confusing to most people.

Clearly this law needs to be worded harsher, so the button MUST say "rent" if you are renting.

[cptroot]

In my experience it's a pretty clear warning, but I might not be the best person to judge. The thing to remember is "buying" a revocable license is pretty different from "renting" a temporary license, and those words have pretty different connotations.

[inigyou]

No, the thing to remember is that "buying a revocable license" is a dishonest way to say "renting for at least one millisecond"

[AnthonyMouse]

> Clearly this law needs to be worded harsher, so the button MUST say "rent" if you are renting.

No, there is a much better alternative.

No renting of copyrighted works for money. The customer owns a copy or GTFO.

[Silhouette]

No renting of copyrighted works for money. The customer owns a copy or GTFO.

That immediately destroys several useful and viable business models that actually work in that they provide more access to more creative work to more people while the rights holders also make a return.

I am in favour of copyright reform but not of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[AnthonyMouse]

> That immediately destroys several useful and viable business models that actually work in that they provide more access to more creative work to more people while the rights holders also make a return.

Does it though? The incremental revenue from customers renting something and then renting it again is going to be very small. The "loss" from providing them with a permanent copy instead would be a rounding error, especially for a product with no marginal cost.

Meanwhile rentals are an attempt to cheat the public out of a bunch of rights they would otherwise have under First Sale etc. Which turns your access argument on its head, because the thing they're being denied is the ability to sell their copy when they're done with it, which in turn denies less well off customers the ability to buy a cheaper copy second hand.

[Silhouette]

Does it though? The incremental revenue from customers renting something and then renting it again is going to be very small. The "loss" from providing them with a permanent copy instead would be a rounding error, especially for a product with no marginal cost.

It destroys the library model used by Spotify, Netflix, and all the other similar services for one example. Those are clearly not working on the same basis as selling permanent copies of everything you might want to listen to or watch. They clearly do make a lot of revenue from subscribers enjoying the long tail of music and programmes and often that includes repeats. Many more people enjoy many more works that aren't the big headliners under this model. People can also try something they might enjoy without committing to the cost of buying it and therefore don't have to feel bad if it's not for them and they give up after a few minutes. And yet obviously the subscribers individually spend far less in many cases than it would cost them to buy permanent copies of everything they'd listened to and watched. Given the popularity and financial success of the streaming services this is evidently an alternative model that works for both sides. So I would challenge your claim that the loss from always providing permanent copies is insignificant.

I don't really buy the other argument you're making either. With digital works there isn't much reason for a "second hand" market where copies would be significantly cheaper than a "new" copy direct from the supplier. When people used to trade used works on physical media there was a degree of degradation in those media that justified a price reduction. Why would someone who had bought a copy of the latest summer blockbuster sell it for 30% of its original purchase price if it's a flawless digital reproduction identical to a new one? Naturally this shifts the dynamics in the market and the price of buying a true permanent copy that can legally be sold on afterwards would tend to increase because of this effect. Meanwhile the library services I mentioned above work on almost the opposite basis and it tends to push the price per work accessed down because the subscribers aren't effectively subsidising other people who are enjoying identical works to themselves but without paying the original source anything to access those works.

I think there is demonstrably room enough in a world of billions of people with access to orders of magnitude more content than any of us could experience even once in our lifetimes for multiple economic models. What matters is that people get to create useful works and other people get to enjoy those works and the financial arrangements make this worthwhile for everyone. There are certainly flaws in the current copyright model that is established in most of the world. There are rights that I think people who have bought (or believe they have bought) permanent copies of works should enjoy with the force of law behind them if necessary.

I don't have a great answer yet to the problem of rights holders not wanting to make anything available permanently at all so that everyone is locked into some form of temporary arrangement. Clearly market forces haven't always sorted that one out effectively and some sort of adjustment is warranted. But I'm also wary of relying on some form of government regulation that distorts the market and potentially excludes arrangements that everyone actually involved might find worthwhile. Maybe you could somehow require that once any work has more than a certain number of licensed copies in circulation or has been available to a certain number of people from authorised sources for a certain (relatively small) number of years then it must also be available for sale as a permanent licence - regardless of any other continuing and still legitimate ways to access it from authorised sources - but with some recognition that a fair price to buy a permanent copy that comes with all the associated rights today might be significantly higher than what these things used to cost in the days when physical media were required.

[AnthonyMouse]

> It destroys the library model used by Spotify, Netflix, and all the other similar services for one example.

Why would that model not work if you got to keep one copy of the current catalog? Consider the existing failure mode of the fractured streaming market: The user signs up for Netflix for one month, binge watches everything they're not caught up on, cancels, signs up for Disney+ the next month, does the same, repeat for each service. They only subscribe for one month out of the year but still get to watch everything.

What would change if they had to sign up for a year a time, but as a result got permanent access to everything that was in the catalog that year? Would people sign up once and then cancel forever? Of course not, because then they wouldn't get any newer content, which is what the services are supposed to be getting paid for anyway. Copyright is supposed to expire; why do we need a business model that relies on renting years-old works that under any sensible system would already be in the public domain?

> And yet obviously the subscribers individually spend far less in many cases than it would cost them to buy permanent copies of everything they'd listened to and watched.

Which is to say, they should offer bulk discounts where you get the whole catalog for a fixed amount, but then what's the problem?

It's not that people could resell them, because if you bought them all at once then you would only be able to resell them all together (can you currently resell individual tracks from an LP?), and then many people would want to keep some of them and thereby keep all of them.

> I don't really buy the other argument you're making either. With digital works there isn't much reason for a "second hand" market where copies would be significantly cheaper than a "new" copy direct from the supplier.

Sure there is. If the price was the same then most people would prefer to support the creators. On top of that there is the same reason most ordinary people buy electronics from Walmart or Costco instead of eBay or Craigslist. The product may be exactly the same, but Some Guy is a lot more likely to take your money and not deliver anything and then people will pay a premium to get it from a trusted source.

> When people used to trade used works on physical media there was a degree of degradation in those media that justified a price reduction.

This argument has always been nonsense because you were always allowed to make a backup copy of something you bought and then transfer that with the original if you sold it. Far from the copyright holder having a right to the degradation, the customer has a right to undo it.

> Why would someone who had bought a copy of the latest summer blockbuster sell it for 30% of its original purchase price if it's a flawless digital reproduction identical to a new one?

Because they don't want it anymore but need to provide some discount or people would just go to the original source. The amount of the discount would depend on supply and demand -- if lots of people buy it but then it sucks and they all want to get rid of it, the resale price is low, but maybe that's what ought to happen then.

> Naturally this shifts the dynamics in the market and the price of buying a true permanent copy that can legally be sold on afterwards would tend to increase because of this effect.

Except that it also increases the value of the product by that amount because the buyer can do that. If the price of a rental would have been $2 and the price of a copy would have to be $10 but you can resell it for $8, what do you care? If you want it temporarily then buy it and resell it; if you want to keep it forever then at least you'd then have the option to do that whereas right now there are things where buying a permanent copy isn't even available.

> Meanwhile the library services I mentioned above work on almost the opposite basis and it tends to push the price per work accessed down because the subscribers aren't effectively subsidising other people who are enjoying identical works to themselves but without paying the original source anything to access those works.

And a buy in bulk plan would still work that way. You would pay for a lot of assorted works at once (e.g. everything in the Netflix catalog that year) for a much lower price per work and then have the option to keep them or resell them all together. Keeping them permanently would naturally be more expensive, but not as expensive as buying them all individually, and either way then it's up to you.

> I think there is demonstrably room enough in a world of billions of people with access to orders of magnitude more content than any of us could experience even once in our lifetimes for multiple economic models.

The general problem here is that copyright is a monopoly, which as a general rule is bad but we're trying to get something good out of it by providing some incentive to create works. But to prevent a monopoly from being abused it needs to have a lot of limitations on it, which is supposed to be fair use, first sale, antitrust prohibitions on tying, etc.

If you just let them do whatever they want then look what happens -- you pay a monthly fee forever to never own anything, things disappear at random, owning a copy isn't even an available option, the service dictates what kind of device you can use to watch it which in turn causes antitrust problems for playback devices, etc. It shouldn't be like that.

> Clearly market forces haven't always sorted that one out effectively and some sort of adjustment is warranted. But I'm also wary of relying on some form of government regulation that distorts the market and potentially excludes arrangements that everyone actually involved might find worthwhile.

The source of the problem is that "government regulation that distorts the market" is already there in copyright itself. It's trying to do something useful, but you can't have it both ways. The thing the market uses to keep things in check is competition. Once the government issues a monopoly, the monopolist has to be strictly limited in what they can do or they'll turn into autocratic robber barons.

[Silhouette]

I might not have much time to continue here in the next few days so I'll start by thanking you for the interesting and thoughtful discussion.

I do agree with some of your important points. It is a problem that copyright works by creating an artificial monopoly without sufficient control on how that monopoly is then used. It is a problem if there's insufficient incentive for creators to make works permanently available to those who want them. As I said earlier I do think some reform is needed in this area.

I don't think that's sufficient today to support your central argument that works should only be available on a permanent basis. The two financial models we've been discussing are a trade off between having access to specific works indefinitely (the sale model) and having access to many more works but only for a limited period of time (the library model). Either way the scope is limited and that makes the price viable. I don't think the prices for streaming services that operated on the alternative basis you're proposing would stay the same. I think they would go way up and that could reduce a lot of people's ability to access the long tail of works that they wouldn't want to spend the full price to buy permanently.

I also want to point out that your views here appear to be based on the US implementation of copyright. Some aspects of copyright in the US are at least questionable under the related international treaties already but pragmatically the US is powerful enough economically that its big companies can get away with a lot for now. Likewise the US itself can get away with having very generic fair use exceptions in its laws. That could change - with very significant economic effects - if the US attempted the kind of legal shift you're proposing without engaging strong international support first. And that would obviously require convincing everyone that the economics would continue to work. In any case some of your arguments about backups and physical media wouldn't apply in most of the world (or even in the US given the DMCA - but of course DRM and the legal protection it's been given around the world is a whole controversy in itself because it potentially makes a lot of the legitimate criticisms of copyright even worse).

IMHO your last point is the place we should look first. The problem is that the market isn't really competitive when copyright holders can license the works exclusively. This leads to problems like works only being available on a single streaming service or broadcast on a single TV channel. Sometimes different seasons of the same show or successive films from the same series end up on different services or channels. Sometimes works get yanked from a streaming service's library with relatively little notice when their deal runs out. If we changed the rules so that works being offered commercially to one distributor also had to be offered to other distributors with similar terms and pricing and within a relatively short time then I think that alone would restore a lot of healthy competition in the market and solve some of the significant problems with how the current distribution models are working. And importantly it is relatively practical to explore options in this area compared to trying to radically restructure the entire copyright model globally.

There's a lot more that we could discuss here. For example we haven't even touched on creative works like software that tend to be updated over time and the different models for supporting that. We haven't considered how to deal with work of potentially high value but a short useful lifetime like news reporting and investigative journalism either. It's a huge area - and that's a big part of why I think throwing out the whole principle of limited licences in favour of allowing only permanent sales is probably not the right way to go here. But the problems are real and I do agree with you that the system could be significantly better than it is today.

[wccrawford]

I wouldn't ban renting. Instead, perhaps we ban rentals of unspecified length.

The customer has to know what they're getting. Either they own it, or they're renting for a certain period. Nothing ambiguous.