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It was definitely considered piracy by the public at the time. Everyone I knew called it a “legal grey area”, but as far as I know it was legally permissable.
The media companies tried their hardest to make it sound like you were destroying the entire industry and you’d go to jail for life as soon as they caught you.
What makes me mad is the boomers I watched copy rentals and NFL games are the same ones telling me I’m stealing by using an ad blocker.
It felt like the wild west for a while because there were so many open problems and each implementation seemed to be focusing on a subset of them. Git handles all of them with decent enough speed that there isn’t much incentive to go against the grain.
I think Git is good enough and so ubiquitous that we won’t see a competitor until coding itself drastically changes shape. Who knows what that will look like, but if it’s not collections of relatively flat files then Git may someday be replaced.