They functionally are. They are compelled to comply under the threat of violence.

The condition in which one person is owned as property by another and is under the owner’s control, especially in involuntary servitude.

It doesn’t say anything about about a military draft exception. All drafts are slavery. It doesn’t matter how noble the people enforcing it think their cause is.

Slavery is okay if you slap a patriotic label on it.

I think that a step in the actual right direction would be forcing platforms to give people actual ownership of what they pay for. If they have a licensing issue and want to pull the game, they can stop new sales, but they shouldn’t be allowed to make it unavailable to people who’ve already paid unless the entire company is going under and the store is shutting down (and even then, they should be forced to provide non-DRM downloads).

Whoever put that specific image in the article embed did it specifically because they knew it would generate this type of argument among people and therefore increase traffic to the article. Y’all got baited.

“Drowning out” less populated areas with more populated areas is a non-issue that conservatives pretend is a bad thing because it’s in their interest to do so. The less popular ideas being drowned out by the more popular ones is fundamentally how democracy is supposed to work. What they really want is to maintain the status quo where some people’s votes are worth several times more than others just because they live in a less densely populated region. Land shouldn’t vote. Borders shouldn’t vote. Corporations shouldn’t vote. PEOPLE ARE THE VOTERS.

This shouldn’t be opt-out. This is the digital equivalent of some fucking pervert showing up at your window and taking pictures of your TV and then letting a bunch of other perverts pay to find out what you were watching so they can use that info to manipulate you, multiplied by however many millions of TVs they’ve sold. Even if the punishment for that crime was just a single week in jail, the people responsible should be facing several hundredthousand years behind bars when you add it all up.

You could probably fit it into the K-12 program without losing any value elsewhere if you cut out things like memorizing maps in regions of the world that are so unstable that those maps won’t be valid anymore by the time kids graduate, studying writers like Shakespeare that lived so long ago that what they wrote in could barely be called English, and mandatory electives.

Matrix is a laggy dumpsterfire. Messages take longer to send in Matrix than they do in Lemmy, and Lemmy isn’t even supposed to be a real-time chat app.

exceot for the fact that it MASSIVELY inflates their stats for investors and advertisers.

Ah yes, the Reddit strategy.

The solution, to me, would seem to be to divide the revenue up on an individual basis instead. Does some sort of licensing issue prevent this? I’d think that the legitimate record labels would want to fix this loophole ASAP so that they can get more money.

How do you track down the sheer number of them so efficiently? You could obviously dig through each one’s profile, but that wouldn’t work for hundreds or thousands.