I’ll give you that it’s a bit ridiculous to treat higher stock prices as a raise, but on the other hand would you expect the stock of a “decimated” company to be rising so fast? Shouldn’t they be crashing?

But like most of these companies, they’re making plenty of money. They’re just greedy, though only insofar as any business is greedy. They see unauthorized uses, add up the licensing fees they think they deserve for that, and say “well we could be making more money”. Any company would do the same, but it’s still missing the main points that are made repeatedly here: 1) those unauthorized uses are part of the reason they’re making so much money to begin with and 2) squeezing every penny out of our culture (music, movies, books, and so on are, to an extent, what define our culture after all) at the cost of limiting our access to that culture is not a fair trade.

These companies could make plenty of money while also improving everyone’s access to our cultural output, but they choose to only see the direct money side of the equation and fail at the rest. That’s where the point of contention lies IMO.