The people that Mux are applying the word “pirate” to here are the people doing the streaming, not the people watching the streams. The people doing the streaming aren’t only “making paid content free to access”; they’re also putting up ads on these sites, making a profit off of IP they didn’t create.

It’s analogous to bootlegging: buying a fake Gucci bag is not unethical; but producing one is.

More importantly, for-money streaming pirates are terrible customers Mux doesn't want to do business with. The kinds of pirates we're thinking about from a decade ago weren't trying to make a quick buck, so they were using things like BitTorrent that had everyone sharing bandwidth.

> More importantly, for-money streaming pirates are terrible customers Mux doesn't want to do business with.

Yep. Their entire business is illegal, so breaking a few more laws by signing up for CDN service with a stolen credit card is no big deal.

> My main objection is labeling _everyone_ as "pirates". Technically, yes, they are pirating the steam.

They (Mux) aren't doing that. The blog specifically talks about going after the people using their platform to distribute the streams, not the people trying to view them.

Having your service used to distribute pirated material is not good. Becomes a big liability, especially if you aren't proactive in trying to stop it.

But they're not paying Mux. Why so angry at Mux for shutting down abuse of their system?

The whole comment section is weird. Is people not realizing Mux has nothing to do with sports rights? They're just a streaming provider that gets misused and have to foot the bill when people use them to stream stuff illegally.