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First-sale doctrine doesn't give you a right to distribute multiple copies to other people, only the right to redistribute your copy. There's not much to adapt to the digital sphere: a digital sphere version would allow you to freely resell your copy, although to sell your copy, you would have to destroy your ability to use your existing copy.

Sure, it's possible someone can cheat the system. But that cheating is as illegal in that state of affairs as it is in the current state of affairs. And it's not like the current state of affairs has been all that effective in preventing such cheating!

If I sell you my physical book then that's easy: delete(arp242.books, "The Winds of Winter") and jcranmer.books.add("The Winds of Winter") both in one easy atomic operation done by me handing the book to you. Libraries basically work the same.

"I promise to delete the copy from my drive, cross my heart, hope to die" is a lot more iffy. How do you verify that? How could you possibly even go after any cheater? Respectfully, I think you're being too dismissive and naïve about this because abuse will be rampant and widespread with zero recourse.

Most people will interact with a digital library through use of some app, something like Steam. Reselling in this context is as simple as the app owner simply deleting the book from your list of books and adding it to my list of books, removing any local copies it knows about in the process (or simply reconciling it the next time the app is open).

Is this a foolproof system? Hell no. It's not even that hard to cheat. But most users aren't terribly tech-literate in the first place. And also, most people tend to want to comply with the law. I quoted elsewhere Gabe's comment about piracy--it's primarily a service problem, and the evidence has generally shown that if you deliver the services that people want, the piracy rates plummet.

A new type of Kindle could be created that is owned by libraries and would solve this.

I'm not sure the practicalities of that will work out (they're pretty fragile and I can foresee a lot of breakage), but it's worth exploring. Also it doesn't completely solve this, because ideally I would be able to read ebooks on my laptop too. You can have special apps and DRM and all of that, but that come with their own downsides.

How does loaning books work?

That's a really good question. It might look something like Steam, but with some important additional features.

1. Resales and lending are built into the platform.

2. Some kind of trust or legal framework so that you can't lose access even if the company operating the platform goes bankrupt.

3. Assets are portable between platforms.

4. Strong legal privacy guarantees.

We mostly don't have stock certificates anymore. They're all electronic assets. But you still own your shares and they can't be freely copied or counterfeited. Why can't we do that for digital intellectual property?

Just like financial crimes will always exist[1], it isn't possible to stamp out piracy. That doesn't mean we have to make everything suck for everyone else.

1. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

(Please, no one say blockchain)

> Just like financial crimes will always exist[1], it isn't possible to stamp out piracy.

As Gabe Newell said of piracy, "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".

By and large, most people want to do the right thing to consume media. If you try to make it really hard to do that to stamp out the pirates, then you're just going to encourage the piracy market. But you can see services like Steam or the various music streaming apps that really did a lot to crush the piracy market just by making legitimate consumption easy. (And you can also see that the attempts by various streaming services to make walled gardens for video stuff that when you make it harder, piracy goes back on the uptick).

I am going to say blockchain. Or, at least a ledger of some type, would be reasonable.

Can we do it without burning the energy of a moderately sized developed nation? BTC used as much power as Greece or Australia by some estimates last year. [0]

[0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364#:~:tex...

Yes, proof of stake like Ethereum's blockchain is more energy efficient. However it could potentially be less secure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake

The users of BTC also pay for that electricity consumption, and value is derived from having a ledger that is not controlled by any government. Building out clean energy sources is the real solution like nuclear, deep geothermal, solar, wind, etc.

POS has it's own issues with requiring massive investments to even participate which just further rewards already rich participants more because those are the only people who can afford to lock up nearly 100k in USD to get rewards under POS.

Until we have >100% renewable all the time all the extra energy used by BTC only causes more CO2 positive sources to produce energy, if miners weren't using that electricity we'd be closer to full renewable energy today already.

The actual value of the existence for the sake of having an alternative 'currency' is also highly suspect to me as the deflationary endgame of BTC is very bad for people hwo are day to day spending most of their income. Deflation is great if you got in early and have large reserves you can sit on but for most people who would earn and spend in BTC mostly deflation is terrible. There's good reasons we moved away from the gold standard which BTC tries to recreate in digital form.

A ledger tech would be sufficient, it need not be blockchain.

Yeah the administration is a bit of an issue around that but it's certainly doable without burning ridiculous amounts of energy. I was mostly joking about the propensity to try to solve everything with a new flavor of blockchain and the massive PITA that is with both energy consumption and consumer protections.

> We mostly don't have stock certificates anymore. They're all electronic assets. But you still own your shares and they can't be freely copied or counterfeited. Why can't we do that for digital intellectual property?

I mean, Cede and Company owns most (all?) of my shares[1]. That's a model that could work --- let a specialist company setup accounts to buy games, and then control access to those accounts. If you want to 'buy' a game, you ask your broker to ask Cede and Co to get you an account, and when you want to 'sell' it, you ask your broker to ask Cede and Co to change the password and give it to a new 'buyer'.

You can do it individually, but a steam account per game is cumbersome.

[1] Well, I have vanguard traditional mutual funds, mostly in vanguard traditional accounts... they might keep the records for those directly in their own books.

> I don't really like any of these options. I think music is the closest thing to where we have "solved" this problem -- streaming music is inexpensive enough and widespread enough that music piracy is essentially a non-issue.

Have we solved it? Streaming platforms are great as a consumer, but they have serious drawbacks: some content is just not available there, content can disappear from your "library" or playlists due to licensing changes, and the economics stack the deck against smaller artists in favor of "unicorn" successes.

> I think music is the closest thing to where we have "solved" this problem '

Music has "solved" the problem of updating the first sale doctrine in so far as it's pushing to remove the option of ownership altogether.

> The future envisioned by DRM is an attempt to deal with the problem of copying through structural rather than legal means. Would an update to the law restrict DRM by putting transferability requirements in place (that is, any DRM scheme needs to have the option to irreversibly transfer the content)? Would it put further DMCA-style restrictions on attempts to circumvent DRM?

Sounds fine to me. I don’t think that publishers should be allowed to interfere with transferability by technical or legal means.

> Would an update to the law restrict DRM by putting transferability requirements in place (that is, any DRM scheme needs to have the option to irreversibly transfer the content)?

Sure, why not?

> Would it put further DMCA-style restrictions on attempts to circumvent DRM?

No, why would that be necessary?

I don't feel I understand what you see as so complicated here.