To further explain, the concept is the same, isn’t it? Watching IRL you can have 2, 3, 10 people around one screen. Online, you can do the same thing by sharing your screen through Discord and similar apps, but in that case it is illegal, you can get accounts banned, warned, etc. and is seemingly considered to be piracy. What is the actual difference between the two?
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It feels like most people aren’t really giving you the differentiation reason. It comes down to what action you are permitted to take. When you stream or watch physical media on a physical player, you are just viewing whatever is on the screen which got there because the media company licensed all of the technology to get it from their server or disk through the media device and onto your TV/monitor. That’s all included in the license. What is not included is any permission to do anything with that image other than watch it, and watch it under certain restrictions. It didn’t grant permission to save the content for any reason using any technique, nor did it say you can re-broadcast the content (which is what happens if you’re sharing your screen). It also didn’t grant you to even use the DVD-TV playing approach to share with, say, a school auditorium — there are provisions in the license that explicitly forbid anything other than at-home viewing or some other very small audience scenarios. They do that because of course they expect you to get a different (“performance”) license, for a lot more money, if you plan to do other stuff with it that generally includes larger audiences or broadcast.
All that said, I don’t think anything in what we’re discussing is “illegal” in the sense of “committing a crime”. Not complying with licensing restrictions I believe is still just a civil violation, and while not legal in a contact sense, isn’t something you can be arrested for. IANAL so check on that (someone else in this thread said DMCA may have made some of this criminal).
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