As a small publisher, strongly disagree with your stance. I regularly find articles of ours that have been re-published years ago without our consent. Unfortunately, the time it takes to file DMCA complaints is onerous, and this is for our relatively small publication. Despite attempts to deal with this, I still find republished articles that have been around for years. These republished articles do cause actual harm to our business, as they sometimes rank higher in search engine results than the original article.

Larger publications, such as the WSJ would probably need several people working full time to deal with this situation, and still fail at catching many instances of infringement. In the case of an infringing article appearing on the front page of HN, that infringement leads to widespread unauthorized distribution.

You wrote in a different comment "HN would suck worse without NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc."

That argument is effectively: It is better to allow infringement, because the articles are worth reading.

Just because something is worth stealing does not mean it should be stolen.

Maybe if HN wants to contribute to supporting journalism – or at least finding a solution to the "problem" – you'll allow the "pain" of not supporting copyright infringement. Pain, after all, can be motivating.

No one will feel that “pain” except submitters. No one is not going to sub to WSJ because they can just lurk around on HN until the article they want to read is posted. That just doesn’t make sense.