US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

You need some mechanism in place to prevent any joe schmoe from spinning up FreeSteam and rehosting the whole thing.

There can be many incentives for people to use official sources: early access, easy updates, live events, etc

"Early access" doesn't work in this context, but yes for the other means.

Just to challenge that idea: Why?

People would use that service instead of Steam, publishers would add annoying DRM to mitigate lost sales, etc etc.

The current illegality of the piracy website prevents them from offering a service as nice as Steam. It has to be a sketchy torrent hub that changes URLs every few months. If it was as easy as changing the url to freesteampowered.com or installing an extension inside the steam launcher, the whole "piracy is a service issue" argument loses all relevance. The industry would become unsustainable without DRM (which would be technically legal to crack, but also more incentivized to make harder to crack).

There's no reason FreeSteam can't also do that, though. There's no copyright, so just have an extension of the steamapp that changes it to point to your server when downloading games / checking ownership. Piracy stops being a service issue when pirates are allowed to make nice services.

> publishers would add annoying DRM to mitigate lost sales, etc etc.

People would just delete the malware (DRM) out of the source code that is no longer restricted by copyright.

If your argument is that copyright is good because it discourages DRM, I think you have a very evidently weak argument.

Copyright does discourage DRM. Even the most egregious DRM these days can be bypassed with minimal effort and is mostly just a nuisance. Take away government enforcement of copyright and how profitable your digital product is will be directly tied to how advanced you are in the DRM arms race.

Steam is the classic example of how this is effective. You compete with pirates by offering what they can't: a reliable, convenient service. DRM becomes more of a hindrance than a benefit in this situation.

Allowing pirates to offer reliable convenient pirate websites that are "so easy a normie can do it" would be a disaster for all the creative industries. You would need to radically change the rest of society to prevent a total collapse of people making money off art.