This frames Google's indexing of the web in a totally, abjectly wrong fashion. It wasn't "other people's data", it was data people published to the public inter

This frames Google's indexing of the web in a totally, abjectly wrong fashion. It wasn't "other people's data", it was data people published to the public internet, implicitly and explicitly granting permission to download through the act of serving that data without restriction to whoever navigated to a particular URL. That's how the internet works. If you want private content, you need to put up a gate mechanism of some sort with authentication or other methods of restricting access. Without that, you are literally having your server "serve" the content to whoever asks for it, without restriction or exception, without ToS or meaningful contract or agreements. You can't have it both ways. "But they didn't know" or other post-hoc claims of innocent people publishing content to the web being misled or confused or abused is infantilizing nonsense. The web wouldn't have been as amazing and revolutionary and liberating if the fundamental public and open nature of its systems was private and walled off by default. Your take on YouTube going viral initially over copyrighted content isn't correct, either - it was ease of use and access. It was fairly popular by the time Google bought it, and once it was reachable and advertised by google itself, it exploded, because by that time, everyone had defaulted to using google for search. Other people corrected your Spotify take. The reason they pirated is because it is functionally impossible to gain access to the data in any other way. For consumers, there are lots of old shows, music, and other content that aren't accessible, so they turn to piracy. A vast majority of the time, if content is accessible, people will pay and do the technically legal and "right" thing. Publishers exploit authors and content creators in the name of "platforming" and "marketing" , effectively doing as little as possible to take 90%+ of the value of a product and providing as little as possible to the producer of content or books or music. They get by on technicalities and have captured the legal arena entirely, with any attempt at reform or revolution meeting a messy death at the hands of lawyers and big money publishers. Screw those people. They lie, cheat, and steal, and somehow have gotten away with fooling the world into thinking they're the good guys. Copying bits and bytes is not stealing, and the ones trying to shill that narrative are trying to fool as many people as possible into giving them more money without any return of value in kind. I'd download the hell out of a car. Pirate everything.