people who grew up with one business model find it very, very hard to give it up, logic be damned ... Wonder how much abuse the average user is going to take before they decide that a book is a book
You're assuming (as am I) that e-books are the same as dead trees, and it's the publishers holding their heads in the sand.
But why must that be the answer? Why can't it be that we're wrong, that this is a brave new world that we need to adjust to?
There's an entire democratic process to change what people expect out of their relationship to government. It involves political parties, speeches, elections, debates, making compromises with the opposing party, and finally resolution.
What we find over and over again is that when folks try to just use the courts and the legal system to implement change, it always results in a lot of friction. There are still people mad in the States about Roe v. Wade, and that was many decades ago.
So the way things change makes a difference. Perhaps the lawyers can browbeat the society into changing. I kind of doubt it -- especially for something this big.
Theoretically yes, anything is possible. We could easily live in a world where publishers charge many times for the same material based on all sorts of random factors like format, time of use, etc. But in reality I just don't see a change of the magnitude taking place without all of the political paraphernalia associated with such changes, no matter how many people they stick in jail or sue.
It's a shame, because just like in the net neutrality issue, the companies could have avoided this by using common sense in their licensing and distribution policies, instead of fixating on the letter of the law (which nobody cared about anyway until mp3s came along)
The minute my grandma can't treat an ebook like she did her old paperbacks the publishers have lost the game. It might be another hundred years (so it wouldn't matter to the publishers and probably be considered by them a "win"), but the laws will eventually catch up to where the people are.
I imagine this will play out like pot legalization -- long and difficult, with a generation of politicians having to pass from the scene before the posturing stops and common sense takes hold.
I'm at the point now where I have a lot of money invested in my kindle e-books. E-books that Amazon says that they really own and won't let me share with folks (until now)
Wonder how much abuse the average user is going to take before they decide that a book is a book. You buy a book, you read a book, then you give or loan it to somebody else. No amount of DRM and legal contracts in the world is going to change that. It's the common sense and natural way of doing things by billions of people versus the state, custom-made laws, and digital jails.
Same game, different channel.
So yes, we're still going to go down that road.