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Bypass Paywalls – A Firefox extension to bypass paywalls of many news sites
- WorkLifeBalance 8y agoIn which jurisdictions is this deliberate circumvention of access controls legal?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- yAnonymous 8y agoIn many jurisdictions it depends on whether the paywall protection is considered effective or not. One could argue that an overlay is not very effective. You can teach most non-technical persons to bypass it in a minute.
- ckastner 8y agoThe effectiveness of the access control is usually a factor. If there is just a banner hovering over the actual text, and the extension merely removes that banner, than one could question whether there even was an access control in the first place. As an extreme example, a Finnish court ruled that CSS (as used by DVDs a long time ago) was ineffective. https://www.turre.com/finnish-court-rules-css-protection-used-in-dvds-ineffective/ https://www.turre.com/finnish-court-rules-css-protection-use...
- edf13 8y agoI agree that a banner or any over overlay is not protection - the content has already been delivered to the recipient.
- darekkay 8y agoIn Germany, this is defined in § 95a UrhG [0], as in "bypassing safeguard measures to gain access to copyright material". "Anti-Anti-Adblocks", as in Adblock filters bypassing adblock popups, were already declared illegal in the BILD case [1]. [0] https://dejure.org/gesetze/UrhG/95a.html https://dejure.org/gesetze/UrhG/95a.html [1] https://www.wbs-law.de/it-recht/verbreitung-einer-anleitung-zur-umgehung-einer-adblock-sperre-ist-rechtswidrig-71569/ https://www.wbs-law.de/it-recht/verbreitung-einer-anleitung-...
- yanonymous2 8y agoIt still depends on whether the protection is considered effective. In the case of this addon, the paywalls are often just overlays that you can also remove manually with a few clicks.
- zaarn 8y agoWhether or not clearing cookies would count as bypassing is an interesting question, because Adblockers themselves are legal. The specific BILD case is about blocking and disabling a tool to detect adblockers, in which case it fully denies access to the article. Ie, the anti-anti-adblock is actively interfering with the site's function on the client side. Cookies and referer are handled on the server-side and outside the user's control. I would question if the last sentences of 95a apply to setting a referer and clearing cookies. They are more closer to tampering with computer system (263a).
- Tepix 8y agoThe first word of the law is "wirksame", which means "effective". It's very easy to argue that this protection that is trivial to circumvent is not "wirksam".
- darekkay 8y agoYes, that's why I've added the second link. Someone posted a tutorial on how to bypass the BILD Anti-Adblock. He argued that this is not an "effective" protection, but a court ruled an "Anti-Adblock" script as "effective".
- yanonymous2 8y agoIt depends on the court. IIRC, that ruling came from the Landgericht Hamburg, which has become a bit of a running gag because of their copyright friendly rulings.
- calimac 8y agoWhat gives the access control identifier any standing that is binding in any jurisdiction?
- msravi 8y agoTechnically, the extension is clearing cookies for the site, and setting the "Referer" header to either google.com or facebook.com. Is it illegal to do that? Source: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/blob/master/background.js https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/blob/m...
- ckastner 8y agoCookie clearing is almost certainly not a legal issue; there'd have to be an explicit legal agreement between the setter and the keeper to be an issue in the first place. The "Referer" header is an interesting question. Hypothetically, if there's be some kind of renumeration for the site (eg: "I grant access to all of your users to my site and in exchange, for every referred visitor, you pay me 0.01 cent"), then spoofing the Referer would incur a financial cost to Google/Facebook. The incurred cost would be negligible for the individual user, but a case could be made against the extension publisher for the aggregated costs.
- esotericn 8y agoIllegal? What? Wallace and Gromit in a case of... the Wrong Bits!?
- MagnumOpus 8y agoIANAL but the definition of Wire Fraud is ridiculously flexible. Manipulation of http headers to get free access to paid services is likely to get you convicted if anyone cared enough to prosecute... Also likely to be punishable under DMCA as circumventing access controls.
- musharofchy 8y agoHere is the Chrome version: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
- amaccuish 8y agoI find it much easier to tell firefox to block cookies and localstorage for such websites. Usually works when they have a certain free allowance. You can do it from the address bar quite conveniently.
- nsomaru 8y agoSelf-destructing cookies (whitelist only) + firefox containers works well for me
- majortennis 8y agoI'd sooner just not use those sites
- mruts 8y agoI'd rather just have access to the information I want.
- tertius 8y agoBy any means necessary!
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoThat's implying you somehow have a right to that content - it's a similar argument that e.g. movie and music pirates use, but which they're not aware of themselves. It's feeling entitled to the content, and/or fear of missing out. But news flash: you are not entitled to something if you don't want to pay for it.
- icebraining 8y agoYou're not entitled to decide what I'm entitled to.
- tertius 8y agoNot as an individual no. But maybe you want to replace "entitled" with "freedom" if you're arguing from a libertarian perspective.
- mruts 8y agoI guess I just don't care?
- hawos 8y agoI want quality journalism but exporsure should be payment enough.
- Jaruzel 8y agoThis is a double edge sword. We complain about too many adverts on sites, and we complain about paywalls. Without ads or paywalls, how do big sites pay for themselves? If you want quality reporting, then someone has to pay those reporters a fair wage for their skill set. As much as I'd like 'information to be free' we do not yet live in a 'Star Trek' world where money no longer has any meaning, and where people produce 'stuff' purely for the benefit of themselves and others. Until we reach that utopia (or dystopia depending on your view) you can't have your cake and eat it; It's Ads or Paywalls, pick one.
- pmlnr 8y agoWhen I hit a paywall, I walk away, or pay up, because that's the ethical thing to do - I do expect no tracking though, when I do pay up. Reasonable ads (fast, 1st party served) would be ok, tracking is really not. But... bots (google, etc) are allowed to get through. I understand the reasons, but then, is it really a paywall? To be honest, I won't bother with cookies and other tricks: logged in, allowed, logged out, walk away. In the end, I agree: don't bypass paywalls, the whole adblocking argument becomes invalid, if we do. Some publishers are trying to find a new way of income, and bypassing that invalidates the efforts. (EDIT: treating bots differently is wrong on so many levels. I changed the User Agent of my miniflux RSS reader to "miniflux-legacy (Googlebot for Tumblr)" from "Miniflux (https://miniflux.net)" https://miniflux.net)" because otherwise Tumblr shows GDPR cookie consent interstitial for RSS feeds. There really, really shouldn't be a separate version for bots.)
- nellaby 8y agoI agree completely in that high quality journalism requires the appropriate wage, and I detest advertising. However, playing devil's advocate, the flip side of pay walls is that you essentially remove/hide quality journalism from being used in the the argument against the poor quality, free to publish 'news' that is often referred to as 'fake news'. Just a thought.
- esotericn 8y agoPaywalls that actually work. The existing model is to treat the Internet as a magazine rack. It doesn't work that way. A user might read one article from the WSJ a month. Obviously they won't pay 5 USD for that, they'll either attempt to get around the paywall or not bother. Giving users a few free articles means that they'll just rotate around sites to get what they want. You need to charge a small amount from hit 1. Not withstanding that it's not hard to build a paywall that actually functions, just don't send the content unless you've paid. This addon relies entirely on the fact that content which has not been paid for gets sent anyway. Realistically though, the answer is that paid journalism disappears, or the Internet as we know it disappears. Increasingly lately it's looking like both will happen.
- forsaken 8y agoOr we could pay for journalism that the world badly needs.
- tertius 8y agoAh but that doesn't scale! Do you have an example?
- imglorp 8y agoBrave browser has a micropayment system. I would like to see this succeed. I'm happy to pay a little cash for content, just not in the form of malware and irritation. https://brave.com/publishers https://brave.com/publishers
- tertius 8y agoI love brave. Is there an ethical journalistic entity that does not run on ad revenue, but only paid for by readers?
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoGo to the shop, buy a newspaper.
- tertius 8y agoThey still sell ads, they still do bad journalism with clickbait etc.
- stfwn 8y agoBlendle (https://blendle.com https://blendle.com) is a news aggregator where you pay per article that you decide to read. Price ranges from ~20 cents for a fluff opinion piece to ~90 cents for quality journalism. It’s just for the Netherlands and possibly Germany (?) atm but they are working towards a US launch. This is a pretty good model I think. It’s accessible and sustainable for both publishers and readers.
- mostafaberg 8y agoI don't understand the point of bypassing, the creators need to make money, if you can afford it, subscribe, if not, use another website. it's that simple
- icebraining 8y agoI subscribe to a couple of sites. I won't be subscribing for an extra monthly fee I can't afford just to read one or two articles linked on HN. Therefore I have two options: don't read the article, or bypass the paywall. In both options, the outcome for the site is exactly the same. So, not being a masochist, why shouldn't I choose the outcome that benefits me without harming anyone else?
- mostafaberg 8y agoBut it is harming someone else in a way, they only want you to read it if you pay for it, there will still be bandwidth costs to cover for people who bypass the paywall, some might argue that in some paywalls, the content is already sent to your browser anyway but that's a whole different story. It's the same argument for piracy, "if I make a copy, I'm not taking away the original, so I'm not stealing", which is just a lie to tell ourselves to feel a bit better at the end of the day.
- icebraining 8y agoI agree it's the same as in piracy, and I do the exact same there - pay for what I can, download the rest. Regarding the bandwidth costs, those are absolutely negligible, since the methods for bypassing the paywalls either only fetch the text (e.g. http://outline.com http://outline.com) or cache it on other servers (e.g. http://archive.is http://archive.is). It is definitively not what they wish, but not complying with someone's wishes is not harming them. -- On that last point, while I don't take my moral code from the law, I note that it agrees with me; for example, even if you have a contract with a guy to build your house, and you say your want a certain brand of pipes, but he ends up using another, you're not entitled to anything. Unfulfilled wishes are not harms.
- bad_user 8y agoBlocking ads being about privacy always seemed like hypocrisy and extensions like these only prove it. Of course, the ads revenue model for the Internet only happened because people basically want free labor, being unwilling to pay for the content they consume, screw the publishers the world will survive. It's sad because what we'll get is legislature and/or more DRM.
- icebraining 8y agoThis extension proves nothing; it's perfectly sensible that someone worried about the privacy of their reading doesn't want to make it worse by tying a payment ID to their profile. Subscriptions are in that sense worse than ads.
- bad_user 8y agoHaha, yes, exactly my point. And this makes me think that the existence of DRM is justified.
- rambojazz 8y agoHow does this work? Do they reuse login credentials or something like that?
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoProbably using a trick to go there via Facebook, there was a trick like that somewhere. Or imitate a search engine, because the news outlet also wants a high Google ranking. Or use a copy from archive.is.
- devilmoon 8y agoDepends on the website usually, one that I managed to "hack" is a newspaper in my country (the biggest one actually) that only hides the article text through a CSS class; You just remove that from the HTML through dev tools and have access to the whole thing. I hope in most cases it is more complicated than that
- grn 8y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong but I think publishers are trying to have the cake and eat it too. They want their content to be discoverable in search engines. They also want readers to pay for it. Given how search engines currently work this is a self-contradictory model. I imagine search engine could offer publishers an API to send content for indexing without having to publish it. Google and others could even charge publishers for that and then published could ask readers for subscriptions.
- ktpsns 8y agoI absolutely support such programs. Similarly to adblockers and DRM, they show that the mechanisms used to generate money simply does not work. Technically it is impossible to expose content to a (web crawler) robot but not to a human (inverse CAPTCHA). And technically it is impossible to control pixels on a free user device. Publishers, if you want to have people pay for your content, make honest paid subscriptions and deal with it that you vanish from the openly accessible web.
- IshKebab 8y agoNot necessarily. I could imagine Google adding a "paid crawling" service where you tell Google how much your content costs, explicitly allow them access via some authenticated method, and then they display the price next to your content in search results. You're imagining that it can't work because it can't work in a generic way with all search engines, including future ones that don't exist yet. But that doesn't have to be the case. Most content providers only care about Google.
- hacknat 8y agoIt’s hardly having their cake and eating it too. It’s the equivalent to wanting placement at a news vendor. Your API idea isn’t a bad one, but I hardly think that these news organizations are at fault for wanting to be discoverable, while also wanting money in exchange for their hard work.
- cmroanirgo 8y agoWhat I find most interesting is the very clear but often ignored 'Cloaking Guidelines' by google: "Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected. Some examples of cloaking include: ... - Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor " [0] Google is happily showing LinkedIn, FB, pinterest and news sites content. But when I, Joe User, go to the page, I see nothing but some login/register/pay now form. How is this not a violation of the cloaking guidelines? Clearly google is getting different content than what I am! (Presumably this is how article's extension works... by masquerading as GoogleBot -- again proving that these sites are serving up different content) [0] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en edit: formatting