It’s perfectly relevant. It’s literally the analogous situation. There’s nothing special about the so-called digital realm.

The same expectations and honor system you described can be upheld in the “digital realm”. The only difference is that people have the arrogance to try to force things upon “digital” users because they can.

And also, I never said the gift was physical in nature.

It's not just about messaging. Although, I'm not sure I agree or disagree about your idea of message ownership, or lack of it; I've got mixed feelings about it.

I think it also comes down to wanting to own the "distribution" chain.

Example scenario (made up, so might have flawed reasoning): If I have an official following on Telegram where I post my art, and there's a fan/knock-off Twitter account reposting my art without my permission. I don't have many ways of stopping them. I could send a DMCA notice, but that's slow and doesn't prevent someone from reopening their knock-off distribution channels. DRM creates friction for most people that they won't even bother thinking about setting up a sidestepping distribution channel that fragments my audience.

Also to add (edit): being perfect isn't the point. I mean, most habits or ways we do things _every day_ aren't even close to optimal; much less perfect. If we threw out everything that's not perfect, we'd be left with nothing.

You don’t really need an example scenario - just take YouTube, the largest source of creator content - it does nothing to prevent you from sharing the videos.

Ultimately if you feel like you’re being wronged DMCA should be used and not a programmatic approach simply because a program has no notion of who was right to begin with.

So in your example you say “my art”, but what if it were not? Should you not be able to post “your art?”

I believe people should handle people issues and computers handle, well, the other stuff.

There is an enormous difference between a tie rack (or any commodity, including digital ones) and a letter or photo of a personal nature. There is nuance in this situation that has to be understood and recognized in order to evaluate why the feature exists and if it provides value.

There's an enormous difference between a physical object, which has inherent scarcity; and information, which does not. We strongly enforce property rights on physical objects because since they are scarce, theft is possible (if a person acquires a physical object then someone else acquires it, it is necessary that the original acquirer no longer possesses it - therefore either it was a gift, or it was paid for in some manner, or the second acquisition was theft). The notion of theft of information was invented by politicians due to an utter lack of creativity with respect to how to incentivise the creation of a non-scarce resource. While physical property rights are rights in the positive sense (they grant owners of physical objects the right not to have those objects removed from them without due consideration), intellectual property rights are rights only in the negative sense (they grant the owners no inherent abilities they did not already have, instead they only restrict the freedom of others by limiting their rights to acquire something that would otherwise be limitlessly abundant).

You’re still not getting it. The “gift” I describe can be a letter or photo of personal nature. My point stands.

Grandma gifts you a photo of her and her partner. Do you believe that you shouldn’t be able to show your own family their ancestors picture?

It’s obviously not reasonable. She could explicitly ask, but ultimately the choice is yours.

> Grandma gifts you a photo of her and her partner.

Which is a contrived example that conveniently sidesteps the two most relevant factors: the personal/intimate nature of the communication and the consequences of sharing it against the person’s will during a timeframe in which it would have an effect on the person's life.

> It's completely reasonable for someone to give you a letter or photo of a personal nature and ask you not to share it (or simply expect you to understand that it's not to be shared).

Yeah, and because I am a good friend, I will not share those photos with anyone, especially if they ask me not to. :)

Yes and some people are somewhat bad friends, and will share them, but not if there's a small barrier to overcome, as it's not worth the effort.

And people are terrible friends and will take the time/effort to bypass any measures necessary to share the photo.

The feature is designed to address the "somewhat bad" case, not to be perfect.

> And people are terrible friends and will take the time/effort to bypass any measures necessary to share the photo.

Exactly. They will pretty much bypass this one as well.

Yes, that's exactly what I said. The feature is designed to address the "somewhat bad friend" case, not the "terrible friend" case. Both of those kinds of people exist in the world.

Reducing the chance of something that you didn't want shared from being shared by a factor of X% is better than nothing. Try to step out of black-and-white thinking for a minute. Just because something is not perfect doesn't mean it's useless.

I'm personally disgusted by tools which actively attempt to prevent someone from doing something which I myself can bypass just because I have the knowledge to do it.

Yes, your example of trying to prevent someone moderately bad from sharing something personal to you which you don't want shared is reasonable. The trouble is, you can use the same mechanism for much less reasonable and more nefarious, corporate things.

So the end result is that we're not to have moderately nice things, lest they be used as a weapon against user freedom by a mega-corporation.

I wonder how many people it actually stops from saving or sharing. If they want to save, they will. If they want to share, they will. I know you are talking about some people who want to save or share but is too lazy to take a screenshot or take a photo with whatever they can.