[airtag]

There's a big difference between a private copy for your own enjoyment and redistributing that on a larger scale. The first one is consuming something you were not meant to consume, with little or no cost to the rights owners. The second on is giving away something that someone else had substantial costs to produce.

In my mind it's fair game to record and watch anything, if it's an unencrypted, freely available broadcast somewhere (local laws here back me up) - That includes the use of VPNs to access it. Sports broadcasters know this and make the use of VPNs quite hard, still if you get it to work, good for you. That includes other sneaky trickery like VPNing into Switzerland, where rebroadcasting other countries' FTA TV is legal, if you can receive them there (e.g. all of the UK's FTA TV) or setting up a remote controlled TV receiver in the country for you own use.

Making these streams available publicly is a different game. Depending on where you live, passing on streams privately again may be OK - for example the country I live in allows passing on recordings to a handfull of friends.

If at any time during the chain from the broadcast to you there's a need to break an encryption to make this possible: No fair game, pirate!

[slackfan]

Is there? the advertising money already went back to the content producer, everybody got paid.

[bobdvb]

If the ad revenue isn't measured in terms of the consumption on the pirate streams then it's not ad revenue. Advertisers don't pay for eyeballs they can't quantify.

If content is consumed via an illegal streaming site then it's potentially hurting revenues elsewhere.

[slackfan]

Assuming those eyeballs would ever hit a legal streaming site.

By the time the content airs, the advertising money's mostly been made and traded already. In the terrestrial broadcasting world -- this is most definitely the case.