Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

I feel like that’s a bit disingenuous. You can rent anything on Prime for a couple £ (I focus on rent as the “buy” has the deletion problem) in multiple video qualities.

I am not disagreeing with the service issues, but a large part of the problem is people not willing to pay what studios deem as market value.

Case in point - early streamers had less fragmentation and still had the same service problem, but they could consolidate at low price due to vc subsidy. And piracy went down.

Let’s not forget Netflix and Spotify were not profitable for ages.

So my money would be on price actually being the cardinal problem.

You have it backwards. The modern world is naturally copyright-infringing. Computers and the digital are copying devices. It's you who, applying an outdated lens of "theft", are stuck in the past.

You know you're wrong. After all, you admitted you pirate everything.

I don't think of passwords as my personal private property. They are merely secrets that I keep. I don't have a monopoly on them. Any number of people could have the same password as I do and I wouldn't even know or care. They are just random numbers of no particular value whatsoever.

The copying of passwords does not cause direct harm. If it did, then the publishing of common password lists would be harmful and criminal. The real crime is the act of breaking into someone's bank accounts and draining their money which actually deprives them of real scarce resources. In other words, theft.

The copying of a password alone is likely insufficient to cause real harm due to numerous layers of security such as multifactor authentication.

The usage of passwords is well aligned with reality. People don't deliberately publish their passwords and then act surprised when others use them. That pathology is exclusive to copyright monopolists.

Exercising control over cryptographic keys is realistic. Ideally, only a single copy will ever exist in the entire universe. I have purpose built cryptoprocessors which help ensure that. In the event they are leaked, they are merely discarded and new ones are issued.

Cryptography is fundamentally built on math. At no point do they deny reality. Cryptographers know that numbers are trivially copied, that's why keys are supposed to be kept secret, not published far and wide. They don't impose laws prohibiting others from copying or deriving the numbers, they know such things are unenforceable. Instead, they design their systems so that such things are not an issue. The whole point of cryptographic keys is that they are secret and cosmologically impossible to brute force. They went beyond making it illegal, they made it mathematically impossible.

Meanwhile, exercising control over copyrighted works requires that corporations control every single one of our computers, lest some user order them to make unauthorized copies. In the event that even a single copy escapes their closed system, there's no stopping it anymore and it's all over for them. They still try to stop it by doubling down on monopolies, passing unenforceable laws, trying to usurp control of our computers and generally increasing the overall tyranny of our society. A heavy cost, and they still fail due to the basic fact that they are trying to control public information.

So even after careful consideration I conclude these things are not even remotely analogous to each other at all.

I already replied to the argument you cited. It's already been explained to you. Even the Supreme Court of the United States disagrees with you.

If I really wanted to be pedantic, I would start claiming that it's all the english expressions you cited that are weird and make no sense at first glance.

I don't "take pleasure in something", I derive pleasure from something. The pleasure is obviously not contained in the object or activity. It's not even a real thing that can be taken. Pleasure is just the way my mind reacts when I engage with an object or in an activity I enjoy. A feeling spontaneously generated from something else.

I don't "take interest in something", I develop an interest in something. The subject did not contain the interest, it just spontaneously appeared in my mind after I considered the subject, leading me to want to know more.

The detail that makes these expressions work is the word "in". The places pleasure and interest are taken from are actually left unspecified. What this means is people "take" pleasure and interest from the intangible abstract world and place them in their minds over the course of engaging with an object or activity. I can definitely empathize with the thought process that produced these weird colloquial expressions.

But who am I to question the meaning of english words anyway? I'm not even a native. That's why I cite authorities such as the Supreme Court of the United States. They say copyright infringement is not strictly equivalent to theft. Courts have ruled that it's not even strictly equivalent to commercial loss. All that makes sense and I believe them.

This really should mark the end of this discussion.