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consteval10/04/20240 repliesview on HN

I would argue that while the developers where the de-facto targets, the true targets are individuals who pirate. However, they're too plentiful and too anonymous to pursue. So, instead, innocent people were targeted.

This, to me, aligns with what we see with many measures, like locking up razor blades. The thiefs are the true target, but they're hard to sift out. So we target the average consumer in practice, who is innocent. They become collateral.

It's a difficult problem because there are both innocent people and actual economic harm being done, and we really need to resolve both of those. Technology helps a lot with this, I mean this is essentially why DRM exists. Yes DRM is sucky, but DRM also allows you to have media on your devices at all. Otherwise, it wouldn't be economically viable, and it would be pulled across the board.