But that’s where your analogy fails. A business can still restrict access. They can enforce certain hours. They can have certain restrictions (e.g., no shirts, no service or no one under 21). They can require an entrance fee (in the site’s case, it is being exposed to their advertising.) If a store wanted they could restrict it to people only hopping on one foot. Clearly that would be a bad business practice but it would be their right. It is their property and they have the right to define how people access it. You don’t get to take away the right just because you want to.
What’s being said here is that if a business exists, then any way people can gain access is fair game and it is the stores fault for not providing 24-hour armed security. That would be ludicrous in the real world.
Yes, I know hackers can construct chauvinistic, flawed analogies to defend doing what they wanted to do in the first place. They’re really good at that. Like I said, every software or movie pirate I’ve met thinks that the are warriors for freedom or some BS.
I don’t want to paint anyone here with that brush, it is clear that some people just want an excuse to do whatever they want. People have always done that. And it’s clear that some people get enamored of that counter-cultural, anarchistic, stick-it-to-the-man way of thinking.
I think if you owned a business that spent a lot of money to set up a server, where running a for profit business, that was no loosing ad revenue (fundamental to your business model) because hackers were bypassing your UI to use your server for “free”. It’s easy to think property rights don’t matter when it’s someone else’s property.
Santayana once said, “Few revolutionists would be such if they were heirs to a baronetcy.” Maybe it’s a product of our dwindling economy that so many people are looking for transparent justification to ignore other people’s property rights. But if you work hard enough, there may come a day when you regret being so callous with other people’s property as you see the next generation laugh at your rights and find paper thin justifications to do whatever they want.