Comment by kmeisthax

> There is a vocal online minority who believe user license agreements shouldn't be enforced and individuals should never be considered accountable for following them, but that doesn't even apply to these resellers.

What you're vaguely gesturing at is that "Internet nerd culture" is downstream of both neoliberal politics and vague anti-corporate sentiment in a way that combines to give you a sort of "Fuck You, Got Mine Socialism" - i.e. one where being able to freeload off a corporation is automatically good and anything that stops you from doing so is automatically evil.

If you were terminally online in the 1980s, you likely remember phreaking - i.e. that funny little box you built that let you scam AT&T out of long distance phone calls at local rates. Later on in the 90s was the Telecom Act, which more or less institutionalized freeloading off of AT&T infrastructure in the name of antitrust and competition[0]. A few years later, we'd get MP3 and file-sharing services that would do to music labels what Cap'n Crunch whistles did to the phone company. And then BitTorrent would do the same thing to oversubscribed cable Internet services that were very much not designed to serve as distributed edge CDNs for other people's content.

Just to be clear, both AT&T and the music labels deserved it, and it's Comcast's fault for not building fiber infrastructure that would actually meet demand. We did not fight those battles for nothing. But it also established a pattern: any company that engages in marketing fictions in order to offer a more palatable price is really just lying about the costs, and it is the Internet's solemn duty to invent a scheme to maximally abuse those services. Fuck your business model, and we should get paid for fucking your business model, even if fucking it will collapse the house we live in.

[0] Apple fans: just imagine AT&T is the iOS App Store and Epic Games is MCI, and then make all your annoying comments about how Apple "deserves to be paid" or whatever, and you'll get it. Just try not to think too hard about how many phreaking kits Steve Jobs sold...