Can proprietary software be justified?

1. It’s morally good when people access information, culture, and entertainment.
2. It’s morally good when the author of a work gets rewarded by their work.

Piracy is morally justified when 1 is a more pressing matter than 2. As such, it’s justified in situations like this:

• If, in the absence of piracy, the pirate would still not pay for the goods - because #2 is set up to zero (the author of the work is not rewarded anyway).
• If it’s impossible to obtain the goods without piracy. For example, abandonware.
• If the author of the work would get breadcrumbs of the money used to access legally the goods, and the pirate compensates the author directly (e.g. donation).

Huh. Based on the community this was posted in, I can assume that the answer the video comes to is “yes” and not watch it. But according to Betteridge’s law of headlines the answer is “no.” I need to argue about this without watching it but I don’t know what stance to argue about.

Ah! I’ll use the Orbit plugin to get an AI to summarize the video for me. Hm. The AI-generated summary says the video describes an anecdote about music copyright violations, talks about some ethical considerations about both music and software piracy, and then:

The speaker concludes by acknowledging the complexity of the issue and the importance of considering the perspectives of all parties involved.

So I guess the answer was “Maybe?” How am I supposed to have a pointless Internet argument about “Maybe?”

Bah. Someone attack me for using AI, at least that’s a debate I can sink my teeth into.

Yes. Next question.