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Yep, it's an ugly one. No one has really addressed the issue of what a digital artifact really means in comparison to a physical one.
Part of me thinks this is just both sides being wrong. The corporations want to make money so they would side with licensing dies with the individual and individuals don't want things to disappear when they die.
Let's look at books themselves. An author writes a book and readers are up in arms when descendants inherit the copyright and this goes on for generations and they are benefitting from something they had nothing to do with, but then bookbuyers want the rights of the books they buy digitally to go to their ancestors. It seems a bit the same to me in how do and should rights pass to the offspring. In the case of physical objects they can become collectors items in their scarcity over time. Digital items not so much, they pretty much maintain the value of what it could be gotten for on the street at the current time.
I don't know what I'm trying to say, but parts of me think the bequest of digital license items is ludicrous. Some will be up in arms saying I bought the item, but most of the fine print reads that you didn't buy the item.
If I think about this as a corporation, I can see a zero game in the end. The money to be made on old titles approaches zero because everyone has bequeathed the item to the offspring who bought a few more over the years and the pile is gigantic after a few generations. More books then could ever be read in the offspring's lifetime. The only money to be made is on new content. Maybe that is as it should be, but I am not sure. When only new content makes money we lose items to the backlist which never see the light of day again. While knowledge will continue to move forward I can see many paths of knowledge disappearing into the abyss of passed on rights that no one uses.
I'm probably talking nonsense now, but I'm just spewing ideas right now to see if anything makes sense to me.
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