Yes, it is, but I think you've misunderstood my point.

You give four examples that you say contest my statement that "if you want to consume copyright protected content you need - unless the copyright owner allows you - to make some sort of value exchange".

You say that this statement is "easily refuted" and give four examples - borrowing from a library; first sale doctrine; fair use; FM radio. For each of these your refutation is based on the fact that you "don't need to pay anything to the copyright holder", but you're missing the other part of my statement (I'm saying missing because it would be judgemental to think that you are deliberately ignoring this, so am saying missing to mean "possibly forgot to consider") which is that unless the copyright owner allows you. I also maybe did not make a clear enough distinction between "allows you" and "grants permission" - the difference being "an allowed use" versus "a licence".

The copyright owner of a book allows you to borrow that book for free from a library because this is part of copyright law and under first sale doctrine the library is permitted to lend out a copy of a book.

The copyright owner allows the library to do this by selling them the book (and, ipso facto cannot prevent that allowed use) and so by extension allows you to borrow that book for free.

Can they stop this taking place? Not once the book has been sold. But they can control the distribution of their book by, for example, printing a limited edition of 100 copies. Can they control whether those books are then sold to a library to be loaned out? I suspect not.

This also addresses your second point, regarding first sale doctrine more generally. It's important to realise that when we're talking about first sale doctrine it's less to do with the copyright contained within the object and more to do with the alienability of that object or "thing" - the right for one person to sell a thing that they own to another person.

Under first sale doctrine when you buy a book (or other object that contains a copyright protected work, a CD, a DVD, etc) you are not buying the copyright itself, you are buying the object which is the physical manifestation of the fixation of the copyright.

Copyright cannot exist until it has been fixed - written down or otherwise captured, because without fixation it is simply an idea.

So under first sale doctrine you are not buying the copyright itself - and when you sell a book you have bought you are not assigning any rights in the copyright; you are selling the object into which the copyright owner has fixed their copyright and which, through copyright law, they have assigned the right for the owner of that object the right to enjoy their copyright.

If you're the first purchaser of the book then yes, you have transacted with the copyright owner. If you're the second owner, then the transaction with the copyright owner has already taken place and it is their permission (exercised through copyright law) which is allowing you to enjoy their work. If you buy a painting or a photograph - also objects that are the physical manifestation of a copyright protected work - you cannot make a print of that painting and sell it, and you cannot duplicate the photographic work and sell those duplications because you have not been granted a licence to do so, but you can sell the painting or photo you've purchased.

Your argument around fair use is a more valid point - however (and at the risk of being accused of being pernickety and overly legalistic here) the fair use is only possible under copyright law, which, again, brings us back to the fact that the author has exchanged one control in return for the greater protection and greater set of controls that copyright gives.

The FM radio one is a real peculiarity of copyright law - and (as you point out) it does not actually allow for uncompensated use. When music is played on radio, there are two copyrights in play - the underlying copyright in the song, and the copyright in the recording of the song. The songwriter is, as you accurately point out, compensated for the use of their copyright. The owner of the recording was (until relatively recently) generally a record companies whose business was to drive revenue from sales of physical records, and in the US those record companies decided that the advertising value that radio play gave them meant it made sense to forgo demanding a royalty for the use of their copyright. The copyright owner in the recording is (in this case, very literally) allowing the radio stations to broadcast the recording without demanding compensation for their copyright, meaning you do not have to pay.

So, as you can see, the four examples you've quoted are - to my opinion - very much examples of situations where the copyright owner DOES control "who does what". I completely accept that my arguments are pretty legalistic in their nature - but that's what we are talking about, the fine grained application of copyright law. The original article is very much about the fine grained application of copyright law - what constitutes fair use, what falls within "controlled digital lending" and whether what the Internet Archive was doing fell within this, or whether - as the publishers argued, and the court agreed - the Internet Archive was infringing copyright by making derivative works by digitising physical books and distributing those digital copies without adhering to the "one physical copy for every digital copy loaned out".