[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

It's a nice thought, but there's no legal infrastructure for it. All of our legal rights involving nonphysical things require pretending they're physical in some way. Some scholars suggest this is a limitation of the human brain & our communication patterns--we need metaphors that relate to the physical world.

That's the wonderful thing about the legal system: When life changes, laws can be rewritten to suit. And the present metaphors being used, which were essentially inherited from other uses, can always be replaced with new metaphors that make more sense in the present context.

It just means taking the time to develop those metaphors, and the laws around them, instead of lazily jury-rigging laws that don't really work. That's something that the digital industry has needed to do, and has avoided doing, for far too long, and which has been the direct cause of many of the digital battlegrounds we've witnessed since the first piece of software was copied and shared on a floppy disk.

Originally Posted by starrigger

But part of that trust includes a social contract that they're not going to turn around and screw me by selling duplicates of my books to others.

Thanks, Jeffrey, for mentioning the Social Contract; the concept that seems to have been tossed by the consumers of digital content, and which needs to be reinstated before it's too late.