> I dislike a lot of business models but I just don’t feel right calling them “silly” and looking for ways to take things I know I don’t have the right to take.

> I dislike a lot of business models but I just don’t feel right calling them “silly” and looking for ways to take things I know I don’t have the right to take. How do you know if you have a right to take them? If it's according to the law, then your ethical stance changes with the wind. E.g., you would believe you have a right to derive new music by taking a chord progression from your favorite song, but not by taking the melody. Worse, the rich history in the U.S. of building new songs out of old chord progressions was preferred to taking melodies chiefly because it was illegal to take copyrighted melodies and put new chord changes to them. So your ethical stance would change depending on whether you happen to be reading the notes that are stacked vertically on the page (i.e., a chord), or horizontally across it (a melody). That's ethically incoherent. If it's according to your own ethical stance, you have to explain what that stance is. E.g., are you ethically opposed to circumventing a company's API to download content in a way they didn't intend? Are you opposed to someone accepting a flash drive from a friend that has their friend's favorite music on it? Someone pasting their big fat head on indy content and reposting as a "reaction video" to steal views? I happen to think these aren't all covered by the same ethical rule, but maybe they are.