Piracy is preservation.
Always has been.
Rightsholders must not be allowed to control how works are preserved, else they can very easily steal from the eventual public domain in ways that mere piracy can never be considered stealing.
Always has been.
Rightsholders must not be allowed to control how works are preserved, else they can very easily steal from the eventual public domain in ways that mere piracy can never be considered stealing.
Everyone likes to shit on patents, but patents are designed well. You invent a thing and in exchange for publishing it openly, you get time-limited exclusive rights to it. Why the hell is copyright not like that?
I think the critique of patents has more to do with the patent officers often being ignorant of blatant, widespread prior art, or having a bizarre idea of how the relevant legal principles should apply in a particular problem domain.
popular stuff that you could watch anywhere, you can pirate of course
but anything more obscure is impossible to find, or was there at one point but is now long gone
It may be a crime in certain situations (most notably, non-commercial infringement is almost never a crime unless done prior to a work's initial publication, but rather a civil issue).