> The objection to rippers is that we were effectively operating on a form of rental model. If someone is paying a lower price to rent your stuff, you can't let them rip all of it and keep it permanently anyway, and this was explicitly contrary to our terms.
Now, did they ask for help with how to keep it permanently or with ripping it to their own device? You are constantly confusing those. If I paid for some content rental, I sure as hell would expect that I can put a copy of it on my laptop to watch/listen/read while offline on the train, and I would expect support for that.
Without meaning to be rude, I'm not confusing anything, and what you would expect doesn't matter, only the law and the terms of our relationship with our customers do.
Still without meaning to be rude, I'm really not interested in discussing our position on that one in any more detail. What we offer is openly described, reasonable, and clearly stated before anyone commits to anything. We get overwhelmingly positive feedback within our target market and very few complaints. We tried playing nice about protecting our work -- far nicer than most people in this business, and probably for far longer too. But people abused it, and then straight-up lied to our faces to try to get us to release the locks and let them do it some more.
So now when someone tries to rip us off, we don't play so nice any more. None of our legitimate customers care, because they don't even notice. However, we do get to still have a business and pay the bills. As a bonus, we also waste far less time dealing with the kind of toxic "customer" who thinks a few dollars earns them 24/7 customer service to explain why they can't set up oursite.com.somecountry and resell all our stuff or give it away with their ads all over the place.
As I said, it's easy to snipe from the cheap seats, and it's easy to feel entitled as a customer. It looks a little different when it's you and your colleagues who gave up their jobs, sold their houses, didn't take holidays for years, and so on, and then a group of people carefully exploited your trusting nature to threaten everything you've built.
What I've shared in this discussion is just the real world experience of people who tried to be optimistic and trusting in the kind of way that others here seem to want, allowing the kinds of behaviour that others here seem to think don't cause any harm. The experience was not good, and operating on that basis proved to be unsustainable. That might upset people here who don't like the outcome we observed, but those are the facts, and to be honest I'm tiring of trying to explain this in the face of open hostility in comments and downvotes. If you want to learn the same lessons for yourself rather than taking my word for it, no-one is stopping you; the price of admission is explained in the previous paragraph.
Now, did they ask for help with how to keep it permanently or with ripping it to their own device? You are constantly confusing those. If I paid for some content rental, I sure as hell would expect that I can put a copy of it on my laptop to watch/listen/read while offline on the train, and I would expect support for that.