> We're already at the point where these costs are negligibly low. It takes more effort to think about the cost of transferring the text of a book over the internet than the actual cost of doing so. That's not what it's about.
No, we're really not there yet. You're overestimating the similarity of future technology to today's. Remember, we've got 80 years left in the century.
Here's what negligible transfer costs actually look like: The time it takes to transfer not just "a book", but the entirety of Sci-Hub, Spotify, Netflix, and every other content library that exists today, is limited only by the speed of light. The cost of storing all of that information is totally negligible. And technology is so totally integrated into our everyday interactions, that the act of "copying" it isn't even a conscious decision! When you reference a song or movie, you seamlessly link your statement to its entire contents, which are transferred like a parenthetical along with the statement itself. You might not even notice yourself doing it; it's just how you communicate in 2070.
> If you're the one recording it, you are (in general) the copyright holder. If you're the copyright holder, you can choose to share it without charging anyone money or placing any restrictions on anything.
Songs you hear, movies you see, pictures, speeches, etc. Hear a song once, remember it perfectly. Just an imperfection of the flesh to be resolved by technology. Doesn't matter if it was over the radio, on YouTube, or at a friend's house. Doesn't matter if it was given to you in an "ad-supported" way; you can cut those ads right out of your memory. You saw/heard it, it's yours to replay forever because you have perfect memory. It's not a "secret" you're obliged to keep either. Communicating memories to others is just what we do, we're just kind of bad at it right now so copyright can still sort of survive. We won't be bad at it in the future. We shouldn't be bad at it, we should be great at it.
> So now instead of taking a few days to read a book, it takes a few minutes or seconds.
I think you might be implying a whole other thing, which is the ability to "absorb" information orders of magnitude faster than we can today. I don't see that on the horizon in the same way that I see what I'm talking about, which is the perfection of "memory" and "communication of memories". You might not be able to read any faster, but you will be able to pass the whole Written Works of Man around in an instant, without even realizing that you're doing it.
> But if you set the price all the way to zero, how does the author make rent? And then where do the books come from?
The business model that we fabricated out of thin air with laws is insane. The idea that by writing a book you have some sort of infinite claim over all people that ever experience that book, regardless of whether they ever made a deal with you or your associates, is absurd. Imagine we made contact with a Second Earth, and some pirate sent them all our books, which they then read. Did today's authors really take trillions of dollars in damages from that act? Because we didn't even know about Second Earth until YESTERDAY. What if it was a secret? How can you have half your "property" wiped out in an instant by copyright violations and not ever know about it?
There's massive demand for media. Hell, there's even demand to be the person who creates media, just for the fame. Stop enforcing copyright and there will be a blip in creative works that will resolve itself within a decade. Authors and songwriters will get paid just like scientists, software engineers, and most online visual artists today: By commission. This is just one of the cool things markets are capable of: Somebody wants something to exist which does not, so they pay somebody who is capable of bringing that thing into existence to do so. If that thing is very expensive to produce (say, it requires the top artist of the day to work for a year), then maybe they have to pool their money with many others. Like local companies funding the construction of a large office building.
So business models are shaken up, different people do probably get paid different amounts (sorry to copyright lawyers and enforcement firms, especially), and in the end art continues to be made like it always has been. People love "consuming" it, and a subset of those people are more than capable of paying for it. The same transactions we've been making simply switch spots in the timeline. I don't pay $10 for the album that was just released, I pay $10 so that the next album gets released. And once it's out there, it's everybody's forever, like all songs and stories and ideas used to be, and should be.
And to preempt the contention that "if that worked it would already work that way", I'd say, we took a wrong turn a really long time ago. When that happens, interests get extremely entrenched. Beliefs get entrenched as well. The concepts of copyright and "intellectual property" are deeply ingrained in our expectations (though not, I would point out, anywhere near as deeply as our expectations of "actual property" law, which is telling). Making this shift is very hard. Probably a long transition period and obscene amounts of money given to existing copyright holders would be required. But it absolutely has to happen. We can't just look superhuman powers in the face and decline them because they would make some recently-invented business models untenable. Everybody should have bit-perfect, infinite memory and bit-perfect communication of arbitrary segments of that memory, because that's a thing that Gods have and you don't decline Godhood.