> Your analogy is flawed in that there are likely laws protecting used of the water of that fountain. Not so with an open service on the internet.
All analogies are flawed. I would hope the difference between something being ethical and unethical is more than just a law.
Again... abusing a free service to avoid a paid service is (usually) unethical and dishonest, regardless of legality. Doesn't matter if you are plumbing your house with public water intended for tourists, filling your backpack with all the honey packets from all the Chick-Fil-A's so you never have to buy honey again, or buying hundreds of thousands of dollars of $1 coins from the government with credit cards so you can profit off of taxpayers. It's abuse of a free service, and it's unethical.
It's only unethical if you strongly support the current economic policies and incentive structures for large corporations. I and many others do not. They do not deserve the tax perks and monopolies granted them and their banker financiers that let them build so much wealth on the backs of the lower classes.
Also, why don't they just protect their endpoints with authentication? It would be simple. They choose not to. There is not an easy way to protect public water or Chick-fil-A honey packets, so ethics is the main mechanism. Not so with internet services. There are countless well tested mechanisms for this.
"endpoints with authentication" -- Because you don't have to login to watch YouTube...
It's not easy to block third party access, it often ends up being a whack-a-mole style game where you block it and then they just get in using a different method. YouTube already has been doing this.
On top of this you are taking money from the creators of the content, not just YouTube itself and violating their terms of service.
If a service tells you not to do it, and you still do it anyway it's quite clear you are being unethical.
Whether a corporation tells people to do something or not is not a direct mapping to whether something is ethical or not.
It wouldn't be wack-a-mole if they just had proper authentication instead of using the freemium model. It's their choice to open up their APIs to unauthenticated anonymous users due to their shady advertising revenue model, and the costs are calculated in their models.
BTW, I've never once read or signed any agreement with YouTube, so I have no idea what you are talking about when you say "the service tells you not to do it".
Even if there was more prominent messaging of the sort, it's not the job of the user to twist themselves in knots to assist wealthy rent seekers' desires to apply ancient business models based on physical property to modern information systems.
I see you chose to ignore part of my reply mentioning the creators you are taking content from without paying. YouTube does not care as much, but the creators are the ones hurt the most, not YouTube.
This points more to a problem with the monopolistic walled garden rather than the user. It's like saying a slave won't have food if you shoot the slave owner.
I actually think you raise a very fair point and believe you have some merit to what you believe in.
I will admit that I am not very fond of YouTube either. They have far to much control over the income source of a good amount of people. They could on a whim take away the monetization of a channel (which they do sometimes) and cause them a lot of financial strain.
In terms of your slave comparison I would say a better comparison would be if the slave owner was doing poorly the conditions the slave lives in are worsened. This highlights that the slave does not have much chances to acquire food on their own. I wish there was more competition but I do not believe starving the slave of the system fixes the owner of the system.
I definitely agree with that however I feel like the barrier to entry to non-technical folks is too high. And then the second problem being that people go where the content is, and the content doesn't want to go somewhere without people. The classic new social media problem.
All analogies are flawed. I would hope the difference between something being ethical and unethical is more than just a law.
Again... abusing a free service to avoid a paid service is (usually) unethical and dishonest, regardless of legality. Doesn't matter if you are plumbing your house with public water intended for tourists, filling your backpack with all the honey packets from all the Chick-Fil-A's so you never have to buy honey again, or buying hundreds of thousands of dollars of $1 coins from the government with credit cards so you can profit off of taxpayers. It's abuse of a free service, and it's unethical.