Your friend sounds like a made-up strawman.

We can do both

This is what I thought about chicken and waffles, till I had chicken and waffles.

I have a Firestick with VLC on it that can browse my PC where I've got all my downloads. Not the most straightforward, but sometimes I want to watch on my PC and this keeps everything central.

While I agree with your distaste, I hope you remain wary. Their incompetence seems to have the outcome of enriching them and their sponsors. Can you still attribute incompetence when they are benefitting?

Regarding dictatorship, the conservatives right now are setting up a lot of things like anti-protest laws that seem toothless because they haven't been used to the fullest extent, but the groundwork is there. It won't take long (likely one election cycle) and I'm sure we'll see them use it in the fullest extent.

Yeah, he has the right, sure. Nobody says he doesn't, nobody says he shouldn't. But right now it's in the media. It's stupid. Now there's more attention drawn to this, and if they lose (though Elon's musk will likely try to bleed them dry rather than try to straight up win) it's now not just a claim, it's a claim backed up by law. He has very little to gain with this stunt.

Cool, then don't.

And nothing of value was lost

People using "honesty" as a veneer to be brutal aren't the same as people that are genuinely honest.

So is Facebook and Twitter. This meme is premature in triplicate.

I'm asking you how the creator of the piece of media can tell the difference, because they can't.

If I make a chair, and someone steals it, I'm down a chair. If I make a chair and someone doesn't buy it, I still have the chair. There's a difference to the creator here that isn't there with digital media. That's why piracy and theft are not the same thing.

And the creator of the piece of media can tell the difference... How?