Sure, and it wasn't the right thing to do, especially if it was from an independent artist. I haven't in well over a decade. There's also a canyon of a difference between that, and if I had re-sold their product, at scale, effectively putting the artists out of business. I'd love to explode copyright, but unfortunately, our society has no mechanism for compensating the people that make this valuable work without it, because a whole bunch of tech execs will say "jeez — i'd really like to get paid for their work instead of them."

> There's also a canyon of a difference between that... effectively putting the artists out of business.

There is a direct line between music piracy you did in the past and the status quo of Spotify paying millidollars to artists today. Another POV is, find me musicians who prefer a world with Internet piracy compared to one without.

You're arguing about something I'm not. I completely agree that what I did was wrong, and to boot, I stopped pirating music as soon as online music stores like itunes popped up despite being an impoverished line cook.

That has absolutely no impact, at all, on my fitness to criticize this current wrong.