It's just traffic based: sales try to get you on a paid plan, or a higher tier. For some accounts they've given ultimatums ("pay for the higher tier by x date or we have to stop providing service"). But I believe those cases were e.g. online casinos doing specific things with the platform (say, evading national blocks on gambling websites) IIRC.
Only GitHub and Gitlab have a large intersection of features. You can probably choose around one from the rest of the list, if they happen to have what you need.
It's a bit of an inappropriate comparison though, since restaurants are ubiquitous and reasonable GitHub alternatives are vanishingly rare. People are quite rightly more troubled when providers in a low-cardinality space become unviable.
> If you violated the GPL, and your project was taken down, how political is that?
It's political, inherently, but it's not "only" political, or it's not necessarily political on the part of the host. As in, most practical hosts _have_ to obey US IP law. They don't _have_ to ban crypto or LLMs. The former only inconveniences or restricts me insofar as the host is unwilling to go to prison. The latter on their whims or personal views.
Rents are just amounts beyond what's needed to cause the thing to exist. At the point of copying something, it already exists.
So payments for the right to do so aren't payments required to bring anything new into existence at that point, save for the legal fiction.
Now you might argue that the future copy-licencing rents are necessary to bring the _original_ creation into being. But that doesn't make them _not rents_.
But I would say that's the second assumption you're baking in here.
As in, we live in a world where e.g. the movie Toy Story exists. Now, certainly Toy Story does provide some good or value to the world. But I don't think you can assume such things provide more value than e.g. open science, free transformation of works, etc.
I get that people enjoy our current IP culture but saying certain things wouldn't exist in an IP-free world is just an argument from consequences that doesn't even really compare consequences between the two.
You assume your premise. But plenty of "intellectual work" is already done without legal cover. It just typically attracts normal profits, rather than super-normal rent-seeking ones.
I guess it depends on the framing: a scam perpetrated on whom? It's not a scam on active investors if you lock in a bump from guaranteed passive investors. The active investors will see gains from that bump. But on the passive investors? On wider society?
If you spot the regulator looking the other way and try to sneak one past, is that legitimate, or sketchy? What if you recently had the influence to make them look the other way or be under-resourced?
You could argue 'treason' is a better word than 'scam'.
I think they do, actually. They just have a disconnect about it. But e.g. removing the triple lock is unpopular not just among those of an age to be affected by it.
Farming subsidies are one of the most criticized parts of the EU. My comment isn't in support of it. But even so, subsidy is quite different from compulsory purchase. The question is: why is steel special. Not in a no-action-vs-some-action way, but why so aggressive?
Ironically I think it's the same for both steel and farmers: they provide votes.
I don't really care for farm subsidies either, but even ignoring that: it's quite a different level of intervention than compulsory purchase. Same with the vaccines. We didn't respond to that crisis by nationalizing AstraZeneca.
My rhetorical point is just that steel gets special treatment probably because it's politically expedient. There are large, politically-relevant parts of the country that are still emotionally tied to the idea that we're an industrial nation. People under the age of 30 still go on about Thatcher and the miners.
There's no real shortage of steel around the world that I know of. We could just stockpile it instead, for example. And in the hypothetical tail-risk scenario this is all supposed to insure against... how do we even get the raw materials for making steel anyway?
You can make this same argument about a great number of things. Why is steel any more critical than food or vaccines or the like? Indeed we got caught short of vaccines recently, and had some nontrivial consideration of running a military op against NATO member over it.
> He convinced them the domain registered in my name and address really belonged to his club
Convinced how? Often such things are via "knowing things" about the account holder.