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.
Because someone has to pay for the storage and bandwidth, which is hugely expensive. To fund it they’d have to charge subscriptions or run ads, same as Google.
Exactly. Everyone gets mad about being asked to pay, but servers and employees are not free. That money need to come from somewhere. And we all know the saying, “If you aren’t paying for it, you’re the product.” A subscription is probably the most ethical way to fund a service like YouTube aside from a “pay what you want” system which runs the risk of not bringing in enough to to cover costs.