Yes, this is currently a problem since we were forced to discontinue the only way to use MetaGer free of charge (for now). I do hope that there will be a solution within this year. In the meantime I’ve sent you a demo key via DM.

There’s MetaGer (https://metager.org/) which is run by German non-profit NGO SUMA-EV. Instead of a subscription it is a pre-paid key that’s consumed per search, so you only ever pay for what you use. The NGO is also part of the European effort to build an OpenWebIndex. Disclaimer: I’m part of that NGO.

My not-yet-wife and I are in that situation rn. I’m on the taller side for a German and she’s average Asian height, so our size difference is bigger than in the comic. ><

Sharing isn’t the issue. The emulator was profiting from it.

I wrote about sharing but even profiting from it should be legally permissible.

If I copied your house key and sold it, would that be alright?

Of course not. There are laws against that. Laws that are not copyright laws.

but I don’t lie to myself that it’s morally defensible.

Oh, sorry, I thought this was about legality. If we want to talk about the morality of evading copyright we should also about the morality of copyright itself, how it historically came to be and whose interests it was supposed to serve (it wasn’t made to support creatives). Actually there is surprisingly little evidence that the introduction of copyright increased the incentives for creatives to publish or made them wealthier (except a select few). I think there is a better case to be made for the morality of sharing creative works unlawfully than for limiting the sharing of those works for a century after their creation.

IANAL, but from a EU-centric perspective on copyright (which is the only one I can reliably talk about) the idea of a proprietary encryption key is bogus. A creative work can be copyrighted if it has sufficient originality (or under some other very specific conditions). Smaller parts of such a work are not copyrighted if they don’t meet that criteria on their own. The encryption key (which is very probably randomly generated and definitely not a creative work) thus can’t be copyrighted on it’s own. At least in the EU, there should be no argument against sharing said key (at least in respect to copyright).

I honestly can’t talk about other jurisdictions (maybe someone else here can) but I imagine it should be similar to this in many other countries.

I - for one - welcome the solarpunk future where we’d meet up with friends to watch indie self-published movies because that exploitative but productive industry didn’t make it for lack of a viable business model.

Nice write-up, but really not helpful since it has nothing at all to do with what is actually proposed in the initiative.