They are bad if your goal is to generate income from content. It’s a tale as old as Napster, and even older.

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iTunes? Amazon? A million other successful business that sell content behind a paywall

Yes these exist, as do software companies like Microsoft and Adobe, all of which have been fighting against digital piracy since inception. You may also have noticed they are all moving to subscription/streaming models. If someone wants to sell digital downloads, there is nothing from stopping them from trying. They just need to treat it as that, a digital sale of a product, and with that comes all the challenges of trying to protect sales of easily reproducible data. Value for value is a different approach.