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I honestly can't understand how this is anything other than copyright infringing piracy. If I put the full text of every book on the New York Times bestseller l

I honestly can't understand how this is anything other than copyright infringing piracy. If I put the full text of every book on the New York Times bestseller list up on a website, surely I would, at the very least, be forced to take it down and no one would be particularly sympathetic to me. Why is this any different? Because the original medium is digital? Because it's technically easy to circumvent the paywall? I don't get it.

bsder 7y ago
> I honestly can't understand how this is anything other than copyright infringing piracy. The ethics are "If your article returns in Google, I should be able to read it." If I can't read it, it shouldn't appear on Google. Unfortunately, I can't enforce this, personally. So, I'm quite happy with these sites that bypass paywalls like these. When I find a site that has a paywall but doesn't show up in my Google search results, we can talk about ethics again.
- tqi 7y ago
  > The ethics are "If your article returns in Google, I should be able to read it." If I can't read it, it shouldn't appear on Google. Why is that?
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  What do you mean by "returns in Google"? If you simply mean that the article shows up in search results, I'm not sure how that's different from the books in my original example. Certainly you'll get links to books on the bestseller list for related search results.
  - wincy 7y ago
    The google user agent crawler is given the full text of the article, I believe. So the companies are trying to have to both ways, by providing the article wholly to the web crawler that indexes the page, but then expecting users to pay for it.
    - 0xffff2 7y ago
      So what? Authors give out free copies of their books to reviewers. Is the line supposed to be that if someone gets the article for free then everyone has to get it for free?
      - bsder 7y ago
        Not at all. Give me a way to remove all paywalled links from my Google search and I'll be quite happy, thanks. Google used to penalize sites dramatically that provided different views to search engine versus user. However, that apparently impacted their ad revenues so it went away.

bsder 7y ago

> I honestly can't understand how this is anything other than copyright infringing piracy. The ethics are "If your article returns in Google, I should be able to read it." If I can't read it, it shouldn't appear on Google. Unfortunately, I can't enforce this, personally. So, I'm quite happy with these sites that bypass paywalls like these. When I find a site that has a paywall but doesn't show up in my Google search results, we can talk about ethics again.

tqi 7y ago
> The ethics are "If your article returns in Google, I should be able to read it." If I can't read it, it shouldn't appear on Google. Why is that?
0xffff2 7y ago
What do you mean by "returns in Google"? If you simply mean that the article shows up in search results, I'm not sure how that's different from the books in my original example. Certainly you'll get links to books on the bestseller list for related search results.
- wincy 7y ago
  The google user agent crawler is given the full text of the article, I believe. So the companies are trying to have to both ways, by providing the article wholly to the web crawler that indexes the page, but then expecting users to pay for it.
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    So what? Authors give out free copies of their books to reviewers. Is the line supposed to be that if someone gets the article for free then everyone has to get it for free?
    - bsder 7y ago
      Not at all. Give me a way to remove all paywalled links from my Google search and I'll be quite happy, thanks. Google used to penalize sites dramatically that provided different views to search engine versus user. However, that apparently impacted their ad revenues so it went away.