The contents is the thing that deserves protection, not every individual instance of a medium it's stored on. If I buy a music CD, I paid for one license to play that album plus some plastic and distribution fees. If I make a copy to play because I don't want to damage the original, if I then lend that copy to my friend, if I rip it to mp3 because nothing plays CDs anymore - in all those cases, only one copy is being used so my one "license to play" should suffice.
> if I rip it to mp3 because nothing plays CDs anymore - in all those cases, only one copy is being used so my one "license to play" should suffice.
Sure, I disagree but whatever. Your license to play in this case shouldn’t extend to lending those MP3s that can easily be copied by as many people as you can “lend” those MP3s to.
> The contents is the thing that deserves protection
Also I disagree with this. The content doesn’t “deserve” to be protected.
I meant the deserve part in the sense that if we're doing copyright, the only thing that makes sense to protect is the work itself, not the piece of plastic or paper holding it. Whether works "deserve" to be protected is an entirely separate discussion.
As for lending, there is very little difference between lending a physical medium and expecting it to be returned and sending a digital asset and expecting it to be deleted afterwards. In both cases you have basically no way of preventing someone from making a copy and have to just trust them and/or dangle the threat of legal action over them. Yes, some things are more effort to copy than others, but with modern phones and OCR, even books can be digitised and copied in a matter of minutes and with no material cost.
So practically, if we wanted to prevent copying, we shouldn't allow lending at all. And I think that would be too important of a thing to sacrifice just to get authors a few extra percent in income (since, as we've seen, people who pirate are not very likely to buy if piracy isn't an option).
> I meant the deserve part in the sense that if we're doing copyright, the only thing that makes sense to protect is the work itself
I disagree with this as well. “Works” don’t deserve anything. Stuff comes and goes.
> So practically, if we wanted to prevent copying, we shouldn't allow lending at all.
Who said we wanted to prevent copying?
IMO we want to prevent cmd+c / cmd+v copying or trivial DRM breaking with Calibre or something. If somebody wants to snap photos of each page of a book to “preserve the work” go nuts. But then don’t go sharing the MOBI they make of those pages.
Yes.
> Why shouldn't they be allowed to do this
They bought a paper book, not the right to lend out an ebook.