> then you're still in effect talking about donations.
No. Donations would imply that you do not have a business model at all. Just set up a business in a way that you do not care about people copying information bits.
> but if the producer of a good is not capable of
> determining the terms under which that good is sold
He is determining the price of his copies and selling copies. But he knows that if everybody else is _also_ allowed to produce copies, nobody will buy his copies. So instead of solving _his_ problem of a obsolete business model (manufacturing and selling copies), he solves it by downgrading everybody else's rights to freely exchange information with eachother.
> This has nothing to do with buttons
It has absolutely _everything_ to do with buttons. Its the same "prohibit DIY-X so we can keep selling X"-principle.
> there's no aristocracy attempting to limit your access
They are limiting what kind of information I and my neighbour may exchange for the sole purpose of making their copy-selling business thrive. The button guild criminalized ordinary people for making DIY cloth buttons in order to make them buy their originals.
> it should be perfectly fine for anyone to read that book
> whether the creator agrees to that or not.
This is not what I am saying, but a consequence. What I am saying is that neither the author nor anybody else should have absolutely any say whatsoever about who is "allowed" to copy what bit of information. Allowing copies only when somebody "agrees" (usually for money) is protectionism and for-profit censorship, pure and simple, and I am against it.
> "DIY" isn't pulling torrents, it would be producing the
> content or software you want to consume or use yourself.
No, the author created the work once, and is afterwards selling copies. This worked 50 years ago, when ordinary people couldnt produce copies, so his copies had value. Today they dont any more, since everybody can produce them effortlessly themselves. My grandmother can copy Avatar as easily as 20th Century Fox can. 50 years ago she couldnt. So today the business of manufacturing and selling copies is gone like the button business. The only way to sustain it is to scare people into not DIY-copying in order to make authors copies "valuable" again, so the author can continue making a living by "allowing" copies like he did in the 50s by selling real-value copies.