This will sound naive, but going back to first principles, the real root problem seems to be the lack of a true digital "ownership" option. If libraries had an

This will sound naive, but going back to first principles, the real root problem seems to be the lack of a true digital "ownership" option. If libraries had an option to choose between digital ownership, vs digital subscriptions, at least they'd retain some foundational level of control over digital media that they bought and own. I feel that as an tech/media industry, we either lost our way or just intentionally chose this path, where we have generally wrongly equated ownership with DRM. But a basic definition of ownership includes the "legal right to use, possess, and give away a thing"[1]... being able to give away a digital object (i.e. via copying), is in no way incompatible with ownership. It's just that today's class of rights holders prefer to rent-seek via licensing, but that is not an insurmountable problem (i.e. it's hard to imagine that in a post-scarcity Star Trek future, they'd still be dealing with software/media licensing in the same way that we do today). [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/ownership https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/ownership