If you had legally purchased DVDs and blu rays during mega-upload's time, and hadn't tried to decrypt them for backup purposes (thus circumventing copyright measures, also using tools developed mostly by "outlaws"), those discs would now be suffering from bitrot and becoming unplayable.
But now we're moving away from physical media, we're fast moving to a world where all you can even "own" legally is a DRM laden copy that can be revoked at any moment by the digital store front providing it. Your windows 11 upgrade requires hardware TPM (a form of hardware DRM that everyone used to really fear) chip support to even install.
And this seems to be the world the hacker news what and tech crowd really wants. I personally miss the old mid 2000's slashdot days when everyone knew better. I haven't changed -- they changed.
Sure the world has changed -- it's somewhat like the world that many hackers invoked in the 2000s when they'd say "it's the industry that won't embrace digital -- the second they make it easier to watch/listen/access content than piracy the problem will go away".
That has more or less come to pass and naturally it's not perfect. But streaming is really young still, we're really just ending the first boom cycle now with predictable gnashing of teeth and disillusionment. For music, at least on the creator side, it's generally seen as a catastrophe. But it doesn't mean the future has to be like this.
The past had its own problems, which IMO is why "everyone knew better" -- everybody was dealing with the problems of physical distribution (but don't forget how many musicians in particular felt Napster was destroying music!).
I was never the hugest Kim Dotcom supporter back in the day or now, maybe that means I'm part of your sheeple crowd, but I supported torrenting, hated the RIAA, etc etc. I don't think about the RIAA these days -- my hatred is directed at Spotify and other rent-extractors, and I dream of a utopia where they are all permanently disrupted by decentralized technologies, or at least global forces are replaced by more local-serving ones.
But now we're moving away from physical media, we're fast moving to a world where all you can even "own" legally is a DRM laden copy that can be revoked at any moment by the digital store front providing it. Your windows 11 upgrade requires hardware TPM (a form of hardware DRM that everyone used to really fear) chip support to even install.
And this seems to be the world the hacker news what and tech crowd really wants. I personally miss the old mid 2000's slashdot days when everyone knew better. I haven't changed -- they changed.