I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble here, but why hasn’t anyone tried to steal youtube’s content and make it available to non-paying users (read: users who refuse to partake in surveillance capitalism).

In the old days we had the piratebay and many others that basically refused to respect “property rights”. YouTube has a massive advantage for coercing people into giving their personal data; you can live your whole life without seeking Facebook’s Meta’s content, but anyone will have to watch a youtube video at some point, and they are very effective at paywalling their content. Front ends still provide your IP address to YouTube which then blocks you if you have any decent proxy/VPN.

In the case of YouTube it is reasonable and acceptable to steal their content and even sell it forward, as the seller is not profiting off the content but off the privacy service it would be providing.

The structural functionalism school of sociology sees crime as necessary for evolution and change in society, but really we can skip the rigorous academic reasoning: this is pretty obvious for most of us who can trace enough of our ancestry to a commercial (and lawful) transaction.