I bought an ebook from google play once, found out it was some DRM crap instead of just a file, so I pirated it.
I'm at the stage of my life now where I can buy stuff, don't punish me for it.
I'm at the stage of my life now where I can buy stuff, don't punish me for it.
Moreover, the copyright term used to be 20 years way back in the 1700s-1800s. If 20 years was good enough back then (before overnight international shipping was possible), it's good enough now.
So look at the reverse: why is even 20 years necessary? For software, that's ridiculously long. If it weren't for pirates, we wouldn't have a lot of older software (like old DOS games) any more because of these copyright terms.
[0] https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/02/08/analyzing-my-roya...
"The Congress shall have Power [...] to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
With emphasis on "limited times". The original period was 14 years. The current standard of author's lifetime plus 70 years is technically a limit, but seems against the intent of the law.
Do you live in a house? Do the people who built it receive regular payments from you?
They build houses and are paid for their work. If they want to keep being paid, they need to keep building houses.
What about the roads you use, do those who built them continue to be paid for their work decades later?
What is "Weird" about your thinking is that somehow because they wrote a book 10+ years ago you feel they should still be paid for it? If they want to be paid today, they should publish another book.
How come you are OK having people pay for books they wrote 10+ years ago but you dont pay others for work they did decades ago?
A construction company builds a house because a clearly defined entity commissions it to do so, so setting up a one-and-done-style transaction (I pay you for your whole effort in constructing the house and that's that) is only natural, and while it's not cheap, people are also willing to pay that kind of price because once built a house will last decades and also because you have to have some kind of shelter. (Though the existence of renting shows that other economical models for financing housing are possible, too).
Books on the other hand are a different matter. Writing a book usually takes on the order of months to years, but few people are willing to individually pay a writer just in order to be able to read a single book. Paying a writer's cost of living for a year or so might be only an order of magnitude or two cheaper than building a house, but compared to a house the value you get out of a typical book is definitively several orders of magnitude lower than the value you get out of a house.
In order for books to be viable, their cost of production needs to be split up among many people, and what's worse, that set of people isn't really known in advance. So the model we've arrived at is that somebody (either a publishing house, but often actually the author him- or herself) fronts that cost and then expects to make it back bit by bit through individual sales, which means that people wanting to read that book are definitively expected to pay their fair share.
And because the whole thing still is somewhat of a speculative endeavour (a book might be genuinely bad or otherwise unpopular, or just have bad luck/timing and therefore not become popular), it also means that some books will still not make back their cost of production, which conversely also means that, other, more popular books will earn healthy profits – but if you just cut out the profits from the popular works, it might mean the averages on which the whole model is based might no longer work out.
(Yes, for popular authors with a reputation to uphold things like preorders, Kickstarter, etc. can work out, too, but you somehow need to be able to get to that point of popularity in the first place)
As for roads – the relationship between road construction companies and whoever commissions that road is the same as with building houses – a clearly defined buyer, who can afford paying the price of a once-and-done transaction because the road will deliver enough value.
If we're looking at the relationship between whoever commissioned that road and the actual end users on the other hand, there are actually some similarities to the models used for books there: The set of expected users of that road isn't clearly defined, yet the costs need to be split up among them. Most of the time that issue is side-stepped by simply paying for roads out of general (or occasionally special) taxation, but other times you get things like toll roads, were road users are very well expected to pay for them for a long time, possibly even after the original construction costs have long been paid off, and maybe more than would just be required for ongoing maintenance.