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Comment by bradgessler | Hacker News Reader

It does justify what they are doing for their shareholders, which they’re legally beholden to.

I’m not debating wether it’s moral or ethical, but if you were in their shoes trying to juice revenue to increase the value of your equity, you’d either charge a monthly fee for users to remove ads or fight like hell against people who are trying to download videos without ads.

That’s exactly what YouTube is doing.

FWIW, I can’t stand ads and I think it’s complete bullshit that they’re suing to take down youtube-dl, but they’re acting complete rational for the incentives they’re optimizing for. The problem is that optimization is at odds with users like ourselves.

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This is just a conjecture, but I suspect that the number of people using YouTube DL is a tiny fraction of those using YouTube proper. Like less than 1%. The potential for revenue recovery here is tiny. And the corporate execs are surely aware that most people who use YouTube DL are likely running adblock. So I disagree that this is about revenue and support the notion that this is about control and sending a message.

This is about whether it's moral and ethical though. You can maximize revenue selling drugs, it's a quite effective method I might add. Nobody considers that acceptable.

I think copyright, advertising and surveillance capitalism are completely unacceptable practices that ought to be banned straight up. They are directly and indirectly responsible for everything that's ruining computer and internet freedom today. If we can't ban them, we should all be aiming to minimize their revenue so that they cease and desist on their own. I'd rather have the entire copyright and advertising industries implode than cede control of my computer to them.

That's what's at stake here. Computing freedom. They need to own our computers in order to stop us from doing basic things like copying and deleting data. If we don't stop them, we will lose something I think is far more valuable than a bunch of industries. We will lose computing freedom.

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