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Comment by gausswho | Hacker News Reader

I can't intuit moral reasoning for why a media rights holder has the right to restrict a rebroadcast. They put it out there to reach a wide audience. Why can't I receive it and share it?

I can play physical copies of music and movies wherever I happen to bring them. Why can't I do it with the digital variant?

Largely I feel like the response to this is a rephrasing of 'because no one will be able to monetize the creation of entertainment'. But that's not a moral reasoning, that's a choice of how to foster a market. Which undermines the explanation of this being about piracy. We can try other ways of growing a market that doesn't inhibit an intuitive natural urge to share.

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> I can't intuit moral reasoning for why a media rights holder has the right to restrict a rebroadcast.

> I can play physical copies of music and movies wherever I happen to bring them

Wait, can you? In the US and EU, physical copies are for personal use only. Where are you that this would be legal?

You're right, I should have qualified that this is a limited use. But the limit is, in practice, quite fluid. They won't make a lawsuit over a slumber party. Probably not for a meetup. I expect they will for a theatre. Will they for a dive bar with a bunch of old CD's and DVD's? Or for a funeral?

The selective enforcement exposes to me that it doesn't really have a ethical leg to stand on.

The limit isn’t fluid. If you’re operating a business, you can’t use music to make money. Slumber party? Fine. Charging people to sleep at your house? Not fine.

> Will they for a dive bar with a bunch of old CD's and DVD's? Or for a funeral?

Not sure where you live but yeah they do, in France they even asked a school to pay for the kids singing a song, they make hairdressers pay, they absolutely would ask a funeral to pay.

Outside of Europe, this is also a thing in Japan.

The ability to do something and legality of it are mutually exclusive (ETA: oops, I mean independent of one another). OP appears to be making a moral argument anyway.

Regardless, no one will magically show up and break arbitrary cd player functionality like they are remotely disrupting Internet access if someone pirates la Liga.

"mutually exclusive" means these things cannot both be true

you're saying if any thing is legal it's impossible, and if any thing is possible it's never legal

> no one will magically show up and break arbitrary cd player functionality

Once upon a time, ASCAP would show up at your small-town record shop and make you pay under threat of lawsuit.

Depends on the country, over here i can legally share it with friends and family. As in legally create a copy and gift it.

I can't mass print/burn/copy copyrighted works, but the key word here is 'mass'.

Physical sharing is inherently limited. You can only share with some many friends, burn so many CD copies.

Purely digital files are so cheap to copy that cost is negligible.

Recreating “physical share” functionality in digital space takes work ($$) for $company and directly leads to less sales.

I think a good moral reasoning would be to think of it like ticket sales. You pay to get in. The event organizers take on risk and expense to run the show. Rebroadcasting is like sneaking people in.

> I can play physical copies of music and movies wherever I happen to bring them

But you can't buy them there.

Sure, you can buy them (cheaply) somewhere else and re-sell in the destination country, but you can't do it affordably at scale.

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