> So let's not pretend Youtube is some fair entity that needs to be paid fairly. They don't play fair themselves.
If you want to use a service in a way that the service provider doesn't want you to, I think it's best to just say so. It's obvious there's a difference between things that are hard to figure out automatically, and deliberately not playing fair.
I'm using a public website the way I want to, by having control over its network requests and visual elements.
If they don't like that, they have venues. One of them is paywall, the other is move to closed ecosystem with proprietary service client. Both would have huge negative impact on the business. So they need to cope with downsides on hosting their service over an open standard in an open ecosystem, where power users can and will take control of how their devices are rendering the content.
I understand. I regularly go and pick flowers from a display in a public park to keep inside my house. There's nothing they can do.
My point is that there's no point pretending we're righting any injustices, or the organisations we do this to deserve this behaviour. We do it because we it's hard to stop us, and there's nothing inside us stopping us from gaining from another's effort.
If you want to use a service in a way that the service provider doesn't want you to, I think it's best to just say so. It's obvious there's a difference between things that are hard to figure out automatically, and deliberately not playing fair.