I meant the deserve part in the sense that if we're doing copyright, the only thing that makes sense to protect is the work itself, not the piece of plastic or

I meant the deserve part in the sense that if we're doing copyright, the only thing that makes sense to protect is the work itself, not the piece of plastic or paper holding it. Whether works "deserve" to be protected is an entirely separate discussion. As for lending, there is very little difference between lending a physical medium and expecting it to be returned and sending a digital asset and expecting it to be deleted afterwards. In both cases you have basically no way of preventing someone from making a copy and have to just trust them and/or dangle the threat of legal action over them. Yes, some things are more effort to copy than others, but with modern phones and OCR, even books can be digitised and copied in a matter of minutes and with no material cost. So practically, if we wanted to prevent copying, we shouldn't allow lending at all. And I think that would be too important of a thing to sacrifice just to get authors a few extra percent in income (since, as we've seen, people who pirate are not very likely to buy if piracy isn't an option).