1 I am utterly puzzled by how they managed to screw that up this badly. Man, if that's what hoops you have to jump through to watch a show "legitimately", it's no wonder sites like Nyaa are flourishing.

I am reminded of Louis Rossmann's video rant from... a few months ago? A year or two? Something like that. He was ranting about Netflix, and how they just would not serve him a 1080p stream on his Linux box (and forget about 4K); it was limited to 720p at most. His theme, as I recall, was that when the companies delivering the "legitimate" product deliberately downgrade the product, piracy becomes morally justified. And even if it weren't morally justified, it's practical. Many people who would be willing to pay for a quality product are turning to the pirate sources because it's the only way for them to get the quality product they would like to pay for. Or... the product that they already paid for, but that somebody (whose name might, perhaps, rhyme with pony) has taken away from them.

2 I should add that starting where I said "And even if it weren't morally justified, it's practical", I was expressing my own opinions. Until that sentence, I was quoting Rossmann's video. But Rossmann didn't talk about the practical aspects of torrenting (that the pirate sources are delivering a higher-quality product than the legitimate ones); that was me saying that.

3 On the one hand, I'm in favour of "piracy" because once it's out there, it's out there, and screw you for trying to  prosecute people for watching movies. On the other hand, it's just mindless consumption of drivel that drives most of it, and getting all worked up about being legally or technologically restricted from getting the maximum bang from your cat-shit dollar is a bit silly to me. On the gripping hand:  copying rights, intellectual property, and such business are absurd legal fictions created to extract as much value from inherently worthless items as possible, and the practitioners should be reviled by all sane people.

4 I can't agree with the wholesale condemnation of all intellectual-property laws. They do serve a useful purpose, though it's also true that their purpose has been much abused over the years, usually due to the love of money. ("For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil", 1 Timothy 6:10). But the original purpose, to allow people to make enough money to live off of from writing books, creating beautiful art, making movies that many people would be willing to pay money to see, and so on -- that purpose is still a useful one. All of those things: fiction books, beautiful pictures, fun movies, all of them are inherently worthless, as you pointed out, at least from one point of view. They serve no purpose except to entertain, to give people a break from a boring routine. And yet... that has inherent worth, too. Not economic worth per se, and certainly not from the perspective of putting food on the table or clothes on your back. Reading a book won't fill your stomach or satisfy your hunger. (Though reading the Redwall series can actually make you hungry; man, does that guy write good feasting scenes!) But good art can lift your spirits or satisfy your soul. There's value in that.

There's more I could write, but I have an appointment coming up, and this would turn into an essay if I let it. So I'll leave it at that: that there should be ways to encourage artists to create, to let them make money off of their creation. I'm very glad that Patreon exists, for example. But also, there was a baby somewhere in the flood of bathwater that modern intellectual property law has become. Let's not throw the entire thing out wholesale; let's be more cautious than that.