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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. The broader issue here is about control -- specifically, who has the right to alter the financial arrangement, at what time.

I think everyone can agree we've seen from academic publishing what a shitshow {public need} + {extractive private IP ownership} can be.

Requesting libraries to enter into agreements with publishers in order to loan copies of their books isn't in the public interest.

Because invariably these publishers will realize they can bump rates year over year. And then private equity will realize they can buy these rights holders for a secure income stream. And then the year over year price growth will accelerate.

And contrast this with physical first sale doctrine. (1) The library bought or was donated a copy of the book. (2) As long as they could store it, no publisher could tell them a damn thing about how they could and couldn't loan it.

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This comment plus the parent changed my opinion on the case. They still may have gone too far be loaning out copies, but the fight to return to physical book loaning practices is worth it. Ownership and long-term availability matter.

Yea, I don't like the whole loaning out idea either. Loaning implies ownership. Corporate propaganda has done a good job of convincing people otherwise. I came across an article that was really good at explaining the issue of ownership around digital goods that people who want to have a balanced view of the situation should read. https://linustechtips.com/topic/953835-you-own-the-software-...

The biggest piece lost in the conversation around digital/IP rights is awareness of how it worked pre-digital.

First sale doctrine (in the US) said the buyer owned the physical copy and could resell or do what they wanted with that single copy.^

Obviously, that isn't portable to a zero-copy-cost digital realm.

However, the "buyers never actually own anything digital" modern reality is vastly different than the historical norm, in favor of publishers and platforms.

What was missed was the conversation around what baseline we should establish around digital ownership.

We've nibbled around the edges (you have a right to decrypt something you've purchased, in some cases), but we never clarified it sufficiently.

And without clarity, buyers only get whatever rights publishers/platforms decide to grant them.

IMHO, we'd be better served by establishing a clear floor of digital ownership rights, that no publisher or platform had the legal right to remove or obstruct.

That's how we did it previously, and it worked well...

^ There were some exclusions around mass/public broadcasting, but those were pretty limited.

> Obviously, that isn't portable to a zero-copy-cost digital realm.

I'm not sure how you figure that. Its still a sale. You might want to read though how much case law there is all over the world that conflicts with that conclusion. Read that post, it has plenty of examples how it doesn't matter if its digital.

Here is one in particular:

In a 2016 Australian case regarding Valve's refund policy for Steam, Australia's High Court carefully examined whether computer games sold through Steam are goods (and therefore property and consumer rights apply to them) or services (and therefore no property or consumer rights or apply to them), and concluded that they are fully goods, and that Valve doesn't merely sell a license to use the software, but in-fact sells the software itself, and that whoever buys a game from Steam becomes owner of the software that they purchased. Australia's High Court concluded: "Each of Valve’s challenges to the applicability of the Australian Consumer Law fails. The conflict of laws provisions in the Australian Consumer Law did not essentially carve out an exception for conduct by foreign corporations like Valve governed by a different contractual proper law. Valve supplied goods (which are defined as including computer software)."

It's incorrect to look at the concept of ownership from solely legal or solely technical perspectives, because reality is a joint application of both simultaneously.

What point is legal prohibition if technical implementation is trivial?

And what of legal requirements if technical implementation is impossible?

The unwritten assumption girding physical ownership was "... and it's non-trivial and expensive to physically copy a book."

With digital copying, that's no longer the case. Consequently, simply to maintain the same system the law would still need to change.

Unfortunately, in the back and forth between extreme positions, publishers used this difference to argue that ownership was no longer financially possible and usher us into the realm of rent-only.

PS: Valve maintains sufficient control of Steam-distributed apps that's a defensible position. A better case would have been GoG.

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