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You mean... no-one has any new models of cars (except for iterations made by the open source community, who have more free time now on account of not having to pay for a car on account of cars being downloadable.)
But they still have access to all the old models of cars. Because they can download them.
The reason people don't think piracy is stealing is because they have a good intuition for when they're being scammed by being charged monopoly pricing instead of the actual cost of creating value.
Most of my favorite artists live off of donations. That we give to them freely because we like them.
I think it's great that you give donations to your favorite artists. But the original topic of this thread was about how Pixiv is making it increasingly difficult to do that. And they're one of the more permissive sites! So for certain forms of art, it's a neverending struggle to just be allowed to give them money, and that struggle seems to be getting worse as the internet becomes more centralized and enshittified.
You might say "hey, who needs new art? we've still got all this old art!" And to an extent that's true. You can spend a lifetime just reading old books and watching old movies. Except that's a pretty sad existence, not being able to experience anything new, or get any art that speaks to contemporary times. And in this case you'd be talking about pirated old porn, so you'd be dealing with blurry low-res scans, h-games that no longer work on modern operating systems, and movies that are corrupted halfway through. Someone has to pay to host the servers, or at least the torrent trackers, and someone has to store all this old data and generously seed it. It doesn't just magically happen, and when every major corporation cracks down on the few weirdos doing it, it has an effect.
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