Copyright is a different issue but if you want to discuss that then it’s worth noting that when copyright law was invented it was intended a bit like a patent law but to protect authors against the cost of printing books. Stories themselves were considered ideas and thus where considered free because before printed books stories would be passed on to one another for free by word of mouth.
More recently and it is actually perfectly legal to copy music off the radio and programs off the TV. It’s even legal for people to share their VHS recording with friends and family and keep those recordings around indefinitely. A great many of purple took advantage of that — those who could afford to buy singles or films would do so while others were happy to wait until it was aired and then copy it one a blank cassette.
Trademarks were also less aggressively pursued. That might have been because before the internet was as commoditised it was apparent when Bobby Joe used Disney’s IP for their kids birthday. But now it’s so much easier for companies to identify and clamp down on what they perceive as theft of their intellectual property.
Whether you agree with current copyright laws or not, there has still been a long history of precedence of greater consumer rights and minor transgressions being ignored...then that all changed when content went digital. However people’s attitudes didn’t change with the switch to digital content. At least not initially. Napster was born from the generation of people who grew up recording music from the radio but who no longer listened to the radio. At the time of Napster, downloading was still pretty slow (or, more precisely, peers uploading the MP3s you wanted were slow) and most MP3s were sub CD quality anyway. So if you could afford to buy CDs then you probably would have done.
The real change was when downloading became more convenient than legally buying. That’s really when piracy took off into the mainstream. But when that happened that was because consumers were desperate for a more modern business model while content owners kept dragging their heels by squeezing their antiquated business model and threatening anyone who didn’t comply.
Let’s also not forget that, for a long time, legally owned content was worse than the same content pirated. eg CD root kits, the unskipable “you wouldn’t steal a handbag” adverts that ironically only appeared on legally purchased DVDs, DVD region locking, etc. If you owned a pirated CD or DVD then your user experience was often better than those who paid for their legal copy.
So I find it really hard to be sympathetic to content holders because they’ve lobbied to extend copyright, reduce consumer rights on digital content, and have held back the entertainment industries for years with anti-consumer practices while the world evolved around them. And I find it hypocritical that they then moan about how everyone else is playing foul and they’re just the victims in all this. It smacks of playground bullies moaning when kids refuse to give them lunch money.
But this is all a very different topic to the one of online services, which was the topic originally being discussed.