This reminds me of the ridesharing debacle. Uber was operating an illegal taxi service which upset a lot of local governments. It was taken to the courts multiple times. Uber won but one of the lessons to young founders was to go for it even if it's not strictly legal - laws can change.
Now I'm not saying what Uber did was necessarily a bad thing. But if I had the idea to disrupt taxi services and learned about the legality of it all, I'd have moved on to the next idea.
YouTube got huge largely due to rampant piracy, in the early days. Straight-up posting copyrighted material unmodified, and all kinds of use of media (songs, especially) in ways that aren't protected by fair use. All while copyright cartels were going after torrent users—YouTube? Made a bunch of people rich, none of them paid for what they knowingly did, and no-one thinks 1/10 as ill of any of them as they do of this guy, now.
What the hell is the lesson of any of this? It sure seems to be "doing unethical and/or illegal things is downright necessary to succeed big-time in business, and doing them successfully will make you rich and, most bizarrely, respected—unless you screw the wrong people (i.e. the bigger scammers/criminals/morally-questionable people) then you're just a criminal and we'll all sneer and spit on you and fine you and send you to prison"
Copyright and taxi-medallion laws are grossly immoral examples of regulatory capture that impoverish and endanger the public in order to provide a much smaller benefit to a small number of "exploiters." YouTube, BitTorrent, and Uber Cab were able to improve this situation, making them very popular despite greatly angering the exploiters. Similarly for, say, marijuana sellers. Doing illegal things that are nevertheless ethically upright and very popular may pay off for a business, as it did in those cases. Or it may not.
It's less likely to pay off when the illegal things are instead unethical, unpopular, and harmful to the public, at least if you get caught—and when they involve betraying the people closest to you, you're probably going to get caught.
This reminds me of the ridesharing debacle. Uber was operating an illegal taxi service which upset a lot of local governments. It was taken to the courts multiple times. Uber won but one of the lessons to young founders was to go for it even if it's not strictly legal - laws can change.
Now I'm not saying what Uber did was necessarily a bad thing. But if I had the idea to disrupt taxi services and learned about the legality of it all, I'd have moved on to the next idea.