When freeloading becomes widespread and normalized, perhaps it is those who are creating the conditions that gives rise to that freeloading who are in the wrong. Digital piracy might be wrong, but the business decisions driving it seem as wrongly-implemented as Prohibition was.
Castigating modern streaming freeloaders might give a feeling of moral superiority, but it seems as futile as yelling at music downloaders back in the P2P days. It's using a bucket to drain the ocean of a widely accepted behavior.
That said, most people don't pirate movies or shows these days, even if they might not have qualms against it- they simply share streaming accounts. Is that illegal, or even against EULA? The platforms don't seem to mind.
> When freeloading becomes widespread and normalized, perhaps it is those who are creating the conditions that gives rise to that freeloading who are in the wrong. Digital piracy might be wrong, but the business decisions driving it seem as wrongly-implemented as Prohibition was.
Do you apply the same standard to other laws? If too many people do it, we must legalize it?
If any of those crimes were being prosecuted in a poor way, or created by some sort of addressable avoidable problem, and happening in such a widespread normalized basis, then perhaps we should look at how enforcement is handled, yes. Perhaps the same can be said of internet piracy, an issue that has been hashed out ad nauseum for decades.
You seem to operate under the misapprehension that I'm saying that if a crime is widespread then it is not a crime. What I'm saying that it may not be a crime, or the current approach of prosecution of the crime is wrongheaded and should be reevaluated. And most importantly, the root causes should be examined to determine how society should progress.
If burglary and shoplifting is happening everywhere because we live in pre-revolutionary France and the sans-culottes are starving and stealing bread to survive, well. We've all read A Tale of Two Cities. Or for a later period of the same country, we've all seen Les Miz. Crimes must be analyzed in their social context.
