> If the benefit of copyright is linear and the cost is non-linear as the number of works in the world grows then at some point we should abolish copyright entirely as the collective costs would be greater than the benefit provided by its incentive structure.

I think it's worth considering not just the number of works, but also the number of copiers.

In the days when copying meant printing presses, the physical act of making copies was overwhelmingly a commercial activity performed by a relative handful of businesses. Making a copy of a substantial work was not something the average person had a serious opportunity to do even once in their entire life, so copyright law only meaningfully restricted a small number of entities. By the mid-1980s, with the proliferation of human-scale media technologies like the photocopier, VCR, camcorder, tape deck, and floppy drive, the number of meaningfully regulated entities began an explosive growth that has not stopped since. Copyright law has been amended with hacks like the AHRA and DMCA, but has never come close to a true reckoning with the modern reality of a copy being just a click away for countless millions of people, never mind cultural phenomena like meme generators, mashups, and fanfic that tend to functionally treat authorship less as a matter of negotiable consideration and more as a matter of tribal history.

I've never thought "piracy" was technically accurate; copyright violation is more like a kind of freeloading: other people are paying for their copies and you're not paying for yours.

At any rate, "changing the rules" can't be a blanket get-of-liability-free card, can it? I mean, if you walk into a convenience store, grab a Coke, and walk out without paying for it, you can't claim "I'm not disregarding payment, I'm changing the rules, rules in which money plays a role." Money plays a role, in the sense that you are expected to pay for the Coke and if you do not, it's theft.

It's uncomfortable to grapple with this, but the publishers were largely looking the other way with respect to the IA's lending library up when they were following the principle of "we've scanned X copies and thus can lend out X copies". Technically, that may still be considered copyright violation, in that the publishers didn't give permission for the copies to be used that way. But they let it slide until the IA decided that the closures of libraries during the pandemic constituted a rationale for "we've scanned at least one copy and thus can lend out as many as we want." SamReidHughes and I don't always see eye-to-eye on many things (hi, Sam), but legally speaking, he's absolutely correct, even if you'd prefer "flagrant copyright violation" rather than "piracy."

I can't believe that the IA did this without knowing full well it was inviting a legal challenge. The original CDL concept at least seems plausible to me, and in any case, I think the terms publishers offer libraries for digital copies are frequently bonkers (e.g., pay $X for a maximum of Y lending times, then be forced to buy a new digital copy). But either the IA deliberately violated copyright with the intent of trying to change the legal standing here -- which necessitates this trial happening -- or they deliberately violated copyright because they are, not to put too fine a point on it, blooming idiots. I would like to think the former, but I'm not sure they have very solid ground to stand on.

Don’t act like there’s an intellectual level to the conversation when they just want to pirate books without paying.

So, if I get pulled over doing 200, do I get to just tell the cop ‘I’m in a hurry, I changed the rules’.

well it continues after the author us dead, you know, to keep motivaring the dead suthor to create more!