Ideally, of course, everyone could charge what they want for what they are trying to do, and everything would be flawless regarding to that. However, if we try to live by this idealism in this digital world, we also have to accept that the road to that said idealism goes through DRM, walled gardens and broken net-neutrality. Basically, to achieve that idealism with modern day digital devices we have to give up digital liberties (including privacy more or less).

I prefer the digital freedom over the anti-piracy idealism anyday. I suppose "digital anarchism" and "digital totalitarianism" would be descriptive terms for the (exaggerrated) ends of the spectrum.

Being an European, I at times praise the American gun culture and how the American constitution is such a holy thing over there (not that I want the guns over here though, but the attitude). What I would love to see is a similar attitude taken towards not guns, but computing. Fuck the authorities who try to whitelist sequences of instructions to execute on my general purpose computer in the name of protecting their copyright or patents, or corporate profits or local monopolies of digital information exchange.

If we ever go to this digital dystopian future (as if some wouldn't claim we are there already!), I firmly believe, and am afraid, that it is first and foremost lead by arguments in favor of entertainment industry (and to some extent by "protecting children" and "catching terrorist", how else...).

This is why the copyright laws and the whole notion of digital copyright enforcement is meaningless for me, and I personally am opposed to them regardless of being well aware that it's almost certainly a battle which can't be won. Not because we'd be wrong, but because digital liberties undermine ability to make profit in many ways. Oh well, at least there were us who tried.

They can earn a living in other ways. Some examples:

- having a day job (this obviously means they won't have as much time to put in the site, I know)

- Service As a Software Substitute (this doesn't work for sites that just display information)

- subscription/premium model (for press sites like Arstechnica, it seems like an alternative)

- donations (this usually doesn't scale up to a salary, but can sometimes cover hosting and more)

- sponsoring

Most of the content is by people who make it available for free: blogs (a good part of the links on HN), forums and community sites (HN itself, StackOverflow, Reddit, ...), non-press sites (personal sites, project site, etc). An overwhelming majority of those don't rely on advertising to exist.

It might be hard to have a "service" that's massively used and that you can host and make available for free (i.e. no ads), but I bet it's not impossible (especially if you can upsell something else. See GitHub, Travis, DropBox).

I'd argue that a libre p2p service is more useful to have (e.g. http://tox.im) than a centralized, "gratis but ad-supported" centralized service like TPB.

Of course they do. Where did I suggest they don't?