I hope most here can agree that taking a web page, doing command-C, command-V, changing a few words in a small amount and passing it off as your own work is wrong.
If you won't throw your ethics into the pit for power, someone else will. And them everybody will be forced to throw the shared ethics or be outcompeted. And collectively, everyone will be poorer as a result.
I'll take the high road, thank you. I'm perfectly fine taking satisfaction in being morally and ethically superior for not stealing someone else's hard work.
I leave it to that someone else to have to resolve the cognitive dissonance. One concrete benefit might be not doing in my 50ies due to stress-related health issues.
And I would happily live in a poorer society with better ethics any day (given some minimum threshold of live quality).
I think you draw the wrong conclusion, even from your link. Your link as I read it is basically saying we are all collectively responsible for good and evil, and that there are supposedly unpopular evils which we ourselves create and implicitly endorse, often counterintuitively.
That doesn't mean we ought to just give up and worship whatever worst thing capitalism produces. If you look at Ginsberg's long history of political activism as an example it's certainly not what he and those around him lived.
At a separate scale from that discussion we need to "play our side" of the game, and that will necessarily involve your personal interpretation of ethics. I believe it is a kind of laziness to dismiss that.
Everyone getting into business knows that competitors want to copy them. Not only that, there are only so many ways to do things, so it's usually a question of how much you're copying.
So inferior goods (using the economic term) can add low-cost options for consumers and are thus a social benefit.
While copying itself isn't bad, in practice those companies often releasing products that are unfit for sale or engage in deceptive advertising.
