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The publishers want it both ways. They need to publish their full article content for search crawlers to read but don’t want humans to see it. The idea that thi
by monocularvision 8y ago
The publishers want it both ways. They need to publish their full article content for search crawlers to read but don’t want humans to see it. The idea that this is a form of DRM protected by the DMCA is laughable in my opinion, but IANAL.
- shaki-dora 8y agoThey mostly just want to survive... But in this case, they specifically want to allow you read maybe a dozen articles per month for free, but also (see above) to eat.
- giornogiovanna 8y agoThen implement technological measures to make sure that this is the case. At the very least, don't just make data freely available to the user and expect them not to read it, just because you visually hid it! And if you're serving non-paywall pages to Google bots, that's kind of against Google's policy, isn't it?
- mike22223333 8y agoNot any more. There were changes.
- monochromatic 8y agoTheir business model has been broken for years. It’s not incumbent on me to help them survive.
- shaki-dora 8y agoYes, but considering you seem to be keen on reading their content: have you considered that their survival may, just possibly, be in your interest?
- pedrocr 8y agoThat's a great discussion to be had anywhere but on an HN thread about how those same organizations are trying to create a precedent for limiting the kind of software you can choose to run on your own computer. These organizations are making the issue harder and harder for themselves by consistently arguing for insane concessions from society and other companies after they were caught napping during the biggest technological revolution in their business since the printing press. We should definitely have discussions on how to have a healthy press in the digital age but that should never include putting up with bullshit like this
- zcid 8y agoIf he felt that way, he would probably have a subscription. I will reiterate what several other posters have said: it's up to publications like WSJ to ensure their content isn't available to unauthorized users. If they're sending content out, they should not be upset that it's being consumed.
- pessimizer 8y agoI've read stormfront threads, too. Additionally, it just seems incoherent to me to pay for things that I read; I pay for things that I want other people to read.
- timbit42 8y agoThen they should get real jobs.
- tomp 8y agoCriminals also just want to survive. That doesn't make their immoral business model legitimate.
- Veen 8y agoCriminals don't perform a useful service for society. Journalists do. Journalism is flawed, but flawed journalism is better than no journalism.
- the8472 8y agoThat's assuming that laws are the perfect arbiter of what is useful and what is not. Some useful and moral activities are or used to be criminal acts.
- Veen 8y agoHow is that remotely relevant to the topic under discussion? I mean, it's true that laws are sometimes unethical or mistaken. But that has nothing to do with whether journalism is useful and worth protecting.
- Koshkin 8y agoThe purpose of the law is not to determine what is useful and what isn’t. People can decide that for themselves.
- pessimizer 8y agoYou make a good case for state-supported journalism, not for individual respect of paywalls.
- Mirioron 8y ago>but flawed journalism is better than no journalism. I would disagree. Flawed journalism means things like mixing in lies in their news stories, mixing in opinion pieces into news etc. That kind of stuff can do more harm than good.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
- johnchristopher 8y agoCould publishers index their own content and expose that through a common querying API that anybody could plug into ? So Google could still deliver ranking and publishers put their content behind their walls.
- jpfed 8y ago>They need to publish their full article content for search crawlers to read At first, I thought it might be possible to solve this by getting search engines to standardize on a vector format that they could accept for protected content. So the crawler sees a 300-dimensional vector that effectively gives a semantic summary of the document. But then I thought content providers could achieve a substantially-similar effect by just serving their documents to search engines in scrambled (e.g. alphabetized) form. They could still provide normal headlines to get them clicks. BUT THEN I thought it would be a really cool and bizarre problem to circumvent this by attempting to devise a method for finding the most-probable original document given its alphabetized version.
- jobigoud 8y agoAnyone should still be able to consume the web as if they were a search engine.