That’s interesting. I’d be a little concerned that widespread use of that might create more legal issues for Archive.org that wouldn’t be problems if it never caught on much. On that basis, I’d probably not use it.

But I’d imagine ideological opposition to such a thing wouldn’t be enough to keep it from catching on either.

Did someone say pirate music sharing thread?

I Am A Pirate - Whitey Cracker

Warez Loader - Whitey Cracker

And everyone knows this one, right?

Don’t Download This Song - Weird Al

One option might be to run certain of your apps in Docker. There are ways to go about running even graphical apps in Docker. And with Docker, you can tell it to mount /home/<username>/.config/someapp on the host to /home/<username>/.someapp in the container.

There ar enough legal gray areas still that it would take a lot of work to even figure out what “all digital piracy” even means. For instance, I don’t think it’s been tested in court yet whether the copying into RAM that your OS does when you run a program runs afoul of copyright.

Though, corporations routinely violate the terms of the GPL by distributing binaries without providing any way to get the source code. I’d say that qualifies as “digital piracy.” So I suppose if the government did try to stop all digital piracy, it wouldn’t be all bad.