Living in a 'free' country' does not mean being able to flaunt the law, especially in this case what those sites do is hardly defensible.
> the French court ruled that the two sites “clearly claim to be pirate platforms rejecting the principle of copyright and bypassing publishers’ subscription access portals.
Of these possibilities, only natural law can command respect. Society can be irrational and pass arbitrary laws for longer than you can stay sane, and dictatorship is, well, dictatorship.
The US constitution and the bill of rights are explicitly based on the idea of natural law.
As homo sapiens sapiens is a social animal, it's difficult to make the distinction between what it "natural aspirations" and "social consensus".
In fact we know from some legal decisions of the time that Natural Law was explicitly used as justification for various legal decisions, in the absence of explicit written laws on the subject.