You didn’t stop solely because of Spotify. You stopped because you had $10/month as an adult. If you were a kid today and didn’t have $10/month do you think you’d be pirating like nobody’s business?
Also consider that this is riskier than it used to be in the 90s: plenty of kids would pirate but they know their parents’ ISP would cut them off.
The more salient comparison is between piracy and spotify (with or without ads)
It's not illegal to mute or look away when an ad is playing; delegating the task to a machine is the same thing, just more efficient.
As mentioned in the sibling comment, this argument-by-example is trivially extensible to piracy. "It's not unethical to watch media at a friend's house. Piracy is just using a machine to do this via a digital encoding instead of an analog one"
BTW, I never really bothered with adblockers until I started getting random malware infections from ads (I'd google search for some info, land on a random discussion forum, and a couple times a month my computer would immediately get infected from ads that had 0-day javascript sandbox escape exploits -- hasn't happened since I started using an adblocker) Oh, and a couple times that I left my web browser open on a page, and sometime in the middle of the night a video ad would start up blasting through the speakers. Yeah, that there drove me to using an ad blocker too.
Sure, but this type of argument-by-example is an easy way to hide both t holes in one's argument[1] and the similarities to piracy. It's also trivially extensible: "Piracy is not much different from streaming a show at a friend's house", in that somebody who had access to the media is sharing it with you.
To be clear, I've heard the principled theoretical argument for adblocking being ethical, and think it has at least some merit. I just don't understand the claim that piracy is meaningfully different. The assumptions required to consider adblocking ethical provide the same shield to piracy.
I'm not making this claim.
I'm saying that in the context of this thread, saying "I wouldn't be pirating in that case, I'd be using YT with adblock" isn't very meaningful because using YT with adblock is equivalent to piracy from multiple relevant perspectives, including ethically[1] and economically. The legal perspective is not an especially relevant one to this thread, since the baseline was already being comfortable enough with the level of legal threat to pirate regularly.
[1] including the belief that both are ethically acceptable. Just clarifying again, because people seem to be reading a lot of implicit claims/value judgments into my comments that are not in there
>Likely [I wouldn't pirate]. Probably I'd use YT with adblock or stream on bandcamp.
You assumed they wouldn't pirate because it's unethical, and I assumed they wouldn't do it because it's illegal. The actual reason could be entirely different.
There’s also plenty of YouTube videos that are basically entire albums in one. One can listen to that copyright infringing content too without even bothering to enable AdBlock. Really for all of your considerations on the legal implications, UX is king and the really the only major factor after the economic, for the end-user.