It really is shocking. For decades, copyright laws have been enforced; and various new laws and powers have been added to prevent people from sharing content with each other. And yet now, it seems governments are willing to accept that big companies are allowed to just take whatever content they want and put it into their own products to on-sell however they like. Like, governments have gone out of their way to block people’s access to sites like zlib; but their the entire zlib archive is just downloaded as a matter of routine business by mega-corps - not to be read, but to be exploited for profit, with nothing at all given to the actual source of the value; not even acknowledgement or a ‘thank you’. And certainly not with consent. Is this somehow ok?

The phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle” was meant to be a hierarchy, where ‘reduce’ was by far the best option, and ‘recycle’ was the backup plan in cases where the others were not viable.

But somehow the message about recycling was twisted to the point where many people believe that mountains of waste are totally fine as long as it is ‘recyclable’. And so instead of reducing waste per person, we’ve increased it. Advertising and convenience seems to overpower any kind of good intention. Perhaps regulation is the only way.