For better or worse, the US legal system and media publishers disagree, and they’ve established the rules that do require cooperation with the copyrights holders to build online streaming services. But as I’m sure you know, it’s at best problematic to call online streaming a “DVD rental”. It doesn’t fall under first sale doctrine if you stream a transcoded copy of the DVD you bought. This is why the laws around digital distribution and copyright aren’t exactly the same as the laws around physical distribution and copyright.

I would say the law around first sale doctrine has not caught up yet more than it actively disagrees.

> It doesn’t fall under first sale doctrine if you stream a transcoded copy of the DVD you bought. This is why the laws around digital distribution and copyright aren’t exactly the same as the laws around physical distribution and copyright.

I don't think transcoding should matter, at least if it's done on the fly, but also it's entirely doable to throw raw DVD bits over the wire. And neither one should count as a copy any more than shining light onto a book makes "copies".

I’m not arguing your opinion, I’m just pointing out the established precedent and law disagrees with your opinion, so it’s going to take some work if you want the outcome you’re describing. Saying it could work in theory if people just transcode on the fly and self-limit the rental rate isn’t particularly convincing, fwiw. The shining light analogy is a little hyperbolic, I’m sure you know. Transcoding & streaming definitely is making a copy, because the bits exist in two places. Not that this matters, it’s splitting hairs that may not exist. The point of copyright law is to give copyrights holder control over who gets to distribute and who gets to consume, and it may not make any difference whether there’s technically copying involved according to however you define copying.

> I’m not arguing your opinion, I’m just pointing out the established precedent and law disagrees with your opinion, so it’s going to take some work if you want the outcome you’re describing.

Except for all the pre-digital precedent that informs and agrees with my opinion.

> The shining light analogy is a little hyperbolic, I’m sure you know. Transcoding & streaming definitely is making a copy, because the bits exist in two places.

I don't think it reaches hyperbole. The bits only need to exist in two places for milliseconds. It should not count as a copy. It's only a copy in a pedantic technical sense.

> The point of copyright law is to give copyrights holder control over who gets to distribute and who gets to consume, and it may not make any difference whether there’s technically copying involved according to however you define copying.

Except they're supposed to lose a huge amount of control after the first sale. This feature of copyright is broken for digital items.

Well, shoot, maybe it’s time to write your congressperson and get copyright law changed to how you think it should be! Beware of Chesterton’s Fence though; you can claim that digital distribution is exactly the same as physical, you can claim a copy should not count as a copy and that anyone who disagrees with you is a pedant (including congress, media, and copyright law itself?), and that old laws are good enough, but there are reasons we are where we are, reasons that have been well covered, philosophized, argued about, and litigated in court. That doesn’t mean we’re done nor that everything’s right, but failure to understand those historical reasons might leave you in a position to not be able to make a compelling case. For example, copyrights holders do in fact lose a lot of control over the physical copy after first sale, the issue here is you’re trying to claim unconvincingly that a cross-over copy from physical distribution to digital distribution has no ramifications whatsoever and should be allowed without question, though you’ve made a whole series of assumptions about how it would work and what conditions it works under, arguing that it’s possible without addressing whether it’s realistic and without addressing the actual reasons we have separate standards for digital distribution today.

Ok.

I mean, Europe's already working on it. I think we'll get there eventually.

And I'm not claiming most of what you seem to think I am.