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Comment by zenoprax | Hacker News Reader

> pirating a copy of the content is fine because others can/do still "buy" or "own" (rent/lease) it.

Piracy is not theft. It is an infringement on another's right to distribute intellectual property.

This lawsuit is wasting a lot of time by not simply addressing the long-standing norm of buying a physical object which bundles the content, the license, and it many cases the copyright protection mechanisms.

Selling a used DVD is possible because the DVD contains the license — it is transferable and irrevocable by dint of its format.

Digital goods lack these distinct features but the language looks the same so people are now feeling the rug pull. Hence, the pushback against abandoning disc sales.

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> Piracy is not theft. It is an infringement on another's right to distribute intellectual property.

That wasn't the direction I was going towards. Sony treats digital copies as if only one can have the ownership rights attached to it. This logic can be extended to any other right.

> Selling a used DVD is possible because the DVD contains the license — it is transferable and irrevocable by dint of its format.

The format does not make it irrevocable, it makes the revocation impossible to enforce. The license is attached to the content of the DVD, not the plastic disc per se. This license gives me the right to read that disk and send that digital copy to my output device. It's also why I can't just copy the content to a disc I own and call it a day. So a digital copy read straight from Sony's storage and sent to my output device can very well have the same license attached to it.

To be honest, I think it's a stupid defense but one that may just fly in places with the best justice money can buy. And there's a lot of money trying to buy a carte blanche to not give ownership rights to digital content, coming from every producer or distributor of such content.

> The format does not make it irrevocable, it makes the revocation impossible to enforce.

Fair point and I should have used less ambiguous terms. I'm also thinking about the "Permitted for Home Use Only" nature of DVDs. Playing DVDs on a projector for profit (assuming no prior permission) is, of course, a breach of their protected rights no different than those who re-stream live sports over IPTV.

It's easy to get caught in the details so I think it's useful to remind ourselves that "Intellectual Property" is fundamentally a temporary legal protection and that everything released to the public becomes public domain eventually, either de jure after N years or de facto (ie. "abandonware").

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