Copyright is literally the definition of “who has the rights to determine how copies are made.” If you were to believe most people who publish content on YouTube, you might think that copyright means authorship, but it does not.

When you purchase a movie on Blu-ray, you don’t own the film. You own a piece of plastic which represents a license to watch the film. But you can’t turn around, make copies, and start selling those copies without violating The film studios “right to determine how copies are made.“

The only difference between a physical Blu-ray (license) and a digital license is that digital license is revocable. It’s not fair. It isn’t just. But it’s literally part of the contract that you agreed to.

There’s a separate discussion to be had around “fair use.” Backing up stuff that you have paid money for does fall into “fair use,“ unless third-party encryption is involved. Because it is against the law to circumvent encryption. (Unless, of course, you’re the FBI.)

This is the only characteristic that separates ripping CDs from ripping DVDs — CDs missed the boat on encryption.

I’m not necessarily arguing for or against anything here other than to simply explain how it currently works (in the US, at least). There’s a separate discussion to be had about perpetual versus revocable licenses after money has been exchanged. Beyond that, there’s a discussion to be about how to protect the intellectual property of the things that you spent millions of dollars creating; and how that fares with the consumers of said intellectual property.

These latter discussions are far more nuanced than most Internet commenters are qualified to decide.

• Based in the US.
• Salary employee (overtime doesn’t apply).
• We embrace “shift-left” methodology, which means that we own our stack, soup-to-nuts.
• It makes zero sense for us to build an application, then toss it over the fence to another team that knows nothing about it.
• We partner with specialist teams for any skill that we don’t have on the team. While many of us have Dev and also Ops skills, we partner (for example) with our SRE team on certain matters. We still own the work, but we “sub-contract” it out to our SRE team.
• We devs are on-call, and the SRE team that supports us is also on-call. Both teams get paged for any production incident. Our team is ultimately on-the-hook, but SREs are there to have our backs.
• It empowers/enforces us to make sure that we don’t ship crap. And if we do, we get paged.
• We think about SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and work to identify trouble spots in the application.

Based on the way you wrote your questions, I sense that your situation is completely different from mine. But we work hard to eliminate silos, eliminate fence-tossing, and partner together with experts to ensure that what we ship is of a high quality so that we don’t get paged in the middle of the night. The better we do our daytime jobs, the more we can sleep in the nighttime.