The explicit, stated purpose of copyright was to encourage sharing of ideas. When it lasted originally 14 years, it worked. Before that, you might have had a great idea and kept it to yourself because why take years of your life researching a subject and writing a book when a publisher’s going to immediately copy it and pay you nothing? 14 years is plenty of time to get a return on your investment and most importantly, after that, it didn’t belong to you anymore. It belonged to everyone.

For example, that would mean District 9 and Hunger Games would be in the public domain right now.

I’m a really great person. I’m good at everything. My friends are all tools and won’t ever be as amazing as me.

Congratulations. I bet those friends are absolutely real.

As someone who maintained an API, 80% to 90% of my time was discovering that hackers were attempting an exploit, blocking it, adding monitoring, building abuse prevention. After we shut our API off, we could turn services back on, especially free services that we only took away because hackers.

Not to mention the support volume. More than half of our support calls were, “Why did you suspend my account? I’m a poor old grandpa. I want to appeal.” Okay, yep we looked into activity and you sent 50000 requests in less than a minute and that’s all you ever did with this account. Did you know hackers lie and will spend hours getting tech support? You go to school to be an engineer to build cool stuff and instead field bullshit support requests all day from people trying to destroy the thing you want to build so they can maybe make thirty bucks and cost you tens of thousands. It sucked the life out of me and turned me eternally cynical.

I’ve pirated content and don’t have any issues with it. What has worn me out

• Sites being pirated don’t give a shit that pirates aren’t going to use them anymore. That’s literally why they blocked them.
• Want to consume content without paying? Do it and maybe share with others how you did it, but don’t make the millionth post bragging about how you’re sticking it to the man. Go rob a Tiffany’s and brag about sticking it to that company. And when they install new security measures, post about how unfair it is and you’ll never take stuff from them again. Or don’t. Really. Don’t. I want to see that post about as much as the post about what you had for breakfast this morning.

As someone who has worked on free Internet services, it used to be easier to make money from ads. A video ad view was worth nearly a dollar US. Audio ads were maybe 7 or 8 cents a listen. Now, a video ad view makes a few cents and audio ads are worthless. They likely did the math about how many audio ads they’d have to play on the phone in your pocket to break even and decided you’d hate it more than they would. Since content owners get just over half of what YouTube makes, they’d probably be pissed about seeing the drop in income too.

Feel free to hate YT. This was an economic decision at around the time when ad revenue had just fallen off of a cliff.