Sharing a physical product is not even close to the same as sharing a digital file. If you share a book/VHS/DVD, that physical item is no longer usable by the original person until it is returned. A digital file shared means the both people now have a file for as long as they want it and now each can share as much as they want.

people could make copies of the physical object, right? you should always record a new album onto a cassette or etc.

The vast majority of people can't make copies of books. Just because you could make a copy of something doesn't mean you had the right to. In fact, the small print stated that you could not for the purpose of redistributing it. If you bought a CD but only had a cassette player in your car, nobody cared that you made a tape for your own use. If you gave that cassette away, then that's in the no-go zone.

All you need to make a copy of a physical book these days is a scanner or camera. Even a smartphone is usable. The only thing stopping people from making copies of physical books these days is that it's time consuming. That's it.

And that can easily be reduced to a few minutes with a decent feed scanner and a knife if you don't care about keeping the original in easily readable condition.

ohmuhgawd becky, look at the pedantry on this one.

this does not refute the vast majority claim that i made. the skill set involved in what you describe is, a) ridiculous, b) way more difficult than just buying another copy of the book, c) if no more copies available, who's going to destroy a book like that?, d) see a

edit: e) google and archive.com cases show this is not allowed. google just did it at such a massive scale that they were beyond the law, and archive.com didn't

It's not difficult and involves basically no skill set. There's a billion apps to help you scan documents and output a PDF. It's even built into mobile OSs at this point. It's just time consuming,that's it!

>In fact, the small print stated that you could not for the purpose of redistributing it.

Prior to the DMCA this was only a civil matter. A question of whether you were vulnerable to a lawsuit.

Now it is a federal crime to circumvent any digital copy protection measures, no matter how feeble they are. Metaphorically, if the MPAA leaves a locked door standing in nothing but a bare doorframe in the middle of an open field on their digital distribution methods, the US federal government considers it a crime to walk around that locked door.

Analog copies had to deal with generation loss and were orders of magnitude slower than a digital copy, plus you subsequently had to physically transport/mail/… those copies around.

So what you're saying is that the internet sped up people's communications and improved our ability to transmit information with minimal entropy... and we as a society decided that this was a problem because people need to be allowed to own ideas as property under capitalist hegemony or else there's no reward for creativity (besides fame and influence, which also doesn't count for much under capitalism unless you can monetize it).

It really does feel like the capitalist system that we as a society locked in during the industrial revolution is just running on hotfixes and fumes at this point, I gotta say.