“Many sci-fi writers foresee a similar fate,”

Please point us to them, preferably one that actually had an understanding of what digital content even *is.

“and I wouldn’t be so bothered *IF* resale rights were preserved.”

That’s what the corporate scumbags deploying this idiocy are counting on: you don’t give a shit about *principles* like fair use, why copyright is only intended to last a limited time, etc. — YOU just want to be ‘permitted” to “re-sell” existing copies. In other words, you take the “secondary market” enabled by the “first-sale” doctrine (or whatever it’s local equivalent happens to be in any given jurisdiction) FOR GRANTED, and just want to cash in on it.

“Can you imagine a musician doing a limited run of 10,000 mp3s?”

Can you imagine anybody actually giving a shit about it if somebody *did*? Let’s ignore the colossal hubris involved in taking advantages of the *benefits* of digital technology while counting on the “enforced scarcity” afforded by analog media. (Well, not actually even by analog media — that CAN be copied, too — we’ve just permitted an entire sub-specialty of lawyers, lobbyists, and leeches tasked with trying to prevent it.)

“Essentially digital goods would no longer be infinite.”

Ah, the “Fritz Chip” scenario — the ultimate corporate media/government wet dream. Pity it hasn’t actually worked out (technical savvy + political principles = “black hat” subversives who break anything like that AS A MATTER OF BASIC PRINCIPLE.)

“However this scenario would require a complete alteration of both the fabric of the internet and computing as a whole, since as we know this would require enforcement at the hardware level.”

It would also require:

1. All previous non-hobbled formats/anything capable of playing them back to magically disappear, which is impossible, for the simple reason that people *do* want interoperability/backward compatibility with the rest of their media.

2. By definition, the only truly “unbreakable” encryption is something equivalent to the one-time pad. Read up on it, sometime — it’s fascinating. One of the really amazing attributes of it, in terms of making DRM completely pointless, is that in order to be *really* secure, the “hardware-level enforcement” would *also* have to be invisible even to the “authorizing” authority. So how do you propose to make the PERMISSIONS (NOT “rights” — please stop calling this a “restoration of rights”) transferable?
Wouldn’t the “licenses” involved with this inevitably be *visible* in some form, say, when you’re switching from one “authorized” device to another? Can’t see how any such ‘enforcement key” would be anything other than a string of data associated with the file in question.

No way to do it.