Personally I think it’s okay so long as you give proper credit somewhere to the original artist, and are willing to stop if they ask you to.

Yes, there probably are. Is that important?

Don’t feel bad about it. He’s basically saying he thinks you’re too cool to actually be real, so you must be fake. Seems like a compliment to me.

No, it’s been around for awhile. In US law, any book over 95 years old is considered public property, and can be shared for free. So, there’s volunteers that take old books and scan them, then put the digital versions online for everybody.

If you’d like to make digital copies of things from your native language/culture and add them to the collection, I imagine that’d probably be fine. I’m not part of the project though, so I don’t know the details of how these are submitted/who you need to talk to/etc.

For space/astronomy news, I recommend Doctor Becky https://youtube.com/@drbecky and Fraser Cain. https://youtube.com/@frasercain

Becky handles mostly astronomy news, Fraser handles mostly space flight news. Both are pretty decent at staying more objective.

How do they treat those that are “beneath” them? Customer service workers, pets, kids, etc. Anyone that they should have some sort of authority over.