I have, however, met a ton of very well-paid tech workers that were extremely against copyright, entirely, especially where it came to paying artists, such as musicians, for their labor. Pretty ironic because the market for software development labor market would probably land somewhere between graphic designers and company IT worker if the commercial software business had no IP protection.

I do think that corporate price gouging is a huge problem that does need to be addressed. But especially with smaller business types — creatives, et al— I still haven’t gotten any grownup answers about what would compel people to get professionally good at something and innovate in the complete absence of copyright: the vastly better business model would be waiting for someone else to do something new and interesting, stealing their work, and then undercutting them in the market because you don’t have R&D/et al costs to recoup. You can’t say that wouldn’t happen because it’s exactly what the AI companies did to billions of people, scoffing at any protest. And ironically, they’re now whining about the Chinese doing it to them.

There are a shitload of people who maintain networks, like home or small business networks, that aren’t network administrators. Most of those people are not prepared to have their Chinese WiFi cameras, myriad smart appliances, and heck, even home computers easily individually accessible from the internet. It’s an extremely simple concept, no?