Thoughts
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—knowledge is a post-scarcity resource and the fact that we use copyright to introduce artificial
scarcity is disgusting. ‘I have infinite copies and it costs me nothing to give one to you but I’m going to make you pay me because I need to make money.’ It’s true that you need to make money, we all need money to buy food to eat. However, that doesn’t justify all forms of making money.
My proposed copyright reform for the internet age (scaled back enough that I think it’s actually theoretically feasible): things published first digitally have a different copyright system from things published on paper. Paper books (including ebooks of paper books) stay the same. Digitally published material 1) has a 30 year copyright term instead of 95 years 2) can be copied non-commercially for free. This is already effectively how the internet works.