Where have we seen this before... ;)
Surely if requested by their government they will keep logs for any specific customer, just like it happen with protonmail.
Surely the support costs of dealing with all the constant abuse reports would outweigh the fee they are charging, not to mention the costs of running the infrastructure (if they're used for piracy they'd need quite a bit of bandwidth)?
Even if you are legally in the clear, it doesn't strike me as a business someone wants to get involved in unless there are alternative objectives they don't disclose.
I'm interested to know where you sourced that number? There are plenty of legitimate use cases for a VPN.
While I agree there is definitely users with subpar intentions, I highly doubt 99% of people subscribing to a VPN are doing it because they are 'scum'.
Employing /dev/null to handle abuse reports is usually pretty cheap.
Nowadays, I pirate games I paid for, so I don't have to run invasive and performance-degrading DRM software that makes assumptions about current computers that might not hold in the future.
It's about convenience and archival, and the creator's compensation.
Philosophically, it's also about protesting about the nature of private property and how in many cases nowadays, a "purchase" is in fact more akin to a lease.
[1] https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/committees/ip/ipreports/swartzcas...
Artists need food, shelter, and comfort just like everyone else. Those things cost money. Even an artist who feels a need to create needs enough funding to survive and get materials. Great works of art require funding. This is particularly true for things like movies and video games - you can have some smaller indie passion projects, but the kind of funding for AAA games or blockbuster movies doesn't just appear out of thin air - it requires a return on investment. If piracy was widespread and universally acceptable, this content would not exist.
Again, AAA games aren't a couple of passionate friends. George on the engine team doesn't want to spend 2 days hunting down an obscure collision detection bug if they're not getting paid.
I don't think this is accurate. There are plenty of legitimate critiques against intellectual property, for example: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intellectual-property/#Ge...
You have an inherent (natural) right to freedom of speech, which includes propagation of information. Intellectual property rights are an artificial construct that is created by society, effectively limiting freedom of speech and granting limited monopolies on distribution of certain information, ostensibly to achieve certain social goals. Both the goals themselves, and to what extent the arrangement is conductive to achieving them, is very much debatable.
So yes, I have an inherent legal and moral right to others' work as I pay for it.