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Comment by mattdeboard | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but I was speaking of lowercase 's' society, not "society-at-large". Friends, acquaintances, family, etc.

Despite what we all may wish would be the case, it's not socially acceptable to deprive rights holders and content producers of the financial value of their rights/content. The notion of rights to content takes primacy over the notion of streaming UFC 500 or whatever they're up to now.

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There's a much deeper debate over abuse of copyright that I won't get into, but it seems to me that if we can say something like "despite what we all may wish" with any level of veracity, then you're in very shaky territory when making declarations about what rights people or entities should have.

Not that there aren't first principles to evolve laws from, but those first principles are very bare, and most of what we decide people should do, and most of the rights we grant (key word) to persons or entities are decided by interpretations of situation based on what we want society to be shaped like.

I don't believe even a bare preponderance of people want society to be in such a shape that government provides no protection to companies who wish to protect their rights.

This is not to say that the government ought to serve as business's proxy in all cases.

What I've been trying to express is not that this law in particular is nessisarily wrong, but that laws have no value beyond their place as instruments of our societal will.

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