5 ms·

For as much as I'd like to receive the utility of such a thing, I don't see how this is anything different than outright theft and therefore it should not be so

For as much as I'd like to receive the utility of such a thing, I don't see how this is anything different than outright theft and therefore it should not be something promoted by any means.

peteretep 7y ago
I agree with you. However, if I was going to argue the counter point here, I’d note that I’m pretty happy with the effect that rampant piracy had in forcing adaptation of sensible pricing in the music industry. Enough of this kind of stuff and maybe it’ll force content publishers onto micropayment platforms.
- TomWhitwell 7y ago
  Musicians would disagree.
  - tareqak 7y ago
    The only way to conclusively prove or disprove your claim would be to have several musicians/singers/songwriters open up their books to show where their wealth came from. From what I have heard over the years, artists and bands make a greater percentage of their wealth from doing concert tours (ticket sales) and selling merchandise than they do from actually selling music via record labels (I have no proof for this claim). My point is somewhat supported by the fact that some successful artists later going on to start their own record labels: if the relationship with the label was otherwise good and the issue was not money, then why make a significant capital investment in creating your own label?
- KarlKemp 7y ago
  Unlike the music industry, journalism has been decimated, especially on the local level. Even success stories with world-wide audiences often barely break even. And unlike music, professional journalism is a necessity for a function democracy. So I don’t quite see the hook for your Schadenfreude here.
  - tareqak 7y ago
    I think calling 'peteretep’s emotion Schadenfreude is possibly incorrect [0]. I think all that 'peteretep is wishing for is a similar sort of evolution/enlightenment in journalism to that of the music industry. We can all agree that professional and ethical journalism is a necessary part of a well-functioning democracy as you point out. We can also agree that journalism has been decimated, especially at the local level, as you also pointed out. The observation that 'peteretep made about music piracy and its effect upon how music is monetized today is a fact: today, we have multiple streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, among others) and music stores (Apple Music, Beatport, Bandcamp(?) among others. The situation in the music industry remains imperfect, but 'peteretep’s claim that music piracy combined with new technology acted in concert as a forcing function to move the music marketplace closer to where producers and consumers want it to be seems sound. I for one consume the vast majority of my US political news from Hasan Piker knowing full well that he is a leftist [1]. He’s a full-time political commentator that streams on Twitch. Ever since I learned about him a few years ago, other political streamers have started streaming on Twitch and other platforms like YouTube. I bemoan the death of the local newspaper, but only because of the lack of coverage. Why can’t people with cellphone cameras stream a townhall or a city-planning meeting and let viewers decide the value of the livestream and any associated commentary? The long-celebrated journalistic institutions today have all in some way, shape, or form been “captured” by the political forces of the day. Did your organization report too much controversial news concerning the political sacred cows? Well then, you lose access, which is a death knell for such burgeoning organizations with high headcount and fixed costs. One last question: who hands out these press passes anyway because it’s not like you need a license in journalism to report the news? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude [1] http://twitch.tv/hasanabi http://twitch.tv/hasanabi
  - rndgermandude 7y ago
    It has been decimated but not so much by pirates, but more so by the publishers themselves creating unbearable experiences, starting to give away everything creating a certain expectation (and now trying to reverse but running into the expectations they created), by the publishers being complacent and reactionary, by social media, by social media companies abusing their network effects, by "free" 24/7 news channels eating the newspaper's cake while at the same time discrediting the entire profession with their more-often-than-not sensationalist low quality reporting, by entrepreneurs backing news site "ventures" which then blasted and keep blasting everybody with low quality "free" clickbait, by publishers starting to imitate those low quality channels and sites (and their "free as in data hoarding" unsustainable models), predatory/hostile takeovers of local newspapers by "big media" and the associated "consolidating" of writers staff with adverse effects on quality, by "stakeholders" shifting from a "I am OK with only a so-so profit; this stuff is important" attitude to a full blown "we need to maximize profits at all costs", and the list goes on. I used to read the German Spiegel weekly, first the issues my dad bought, then later as I grew older buying their magazine. I stopped buying it years back, as it stopped being worth it, as the quality of the articles and investigative work plummeted, and article research turned into op-ed pieces.
- kingosticks 7y ago
  Are you talking in terms of album prices being reduced (have they??) or the ability to buy individual songs and essentially only pay for the parts of a musicians work you like? Encouraging publishers to use their influence over the content creators to focus on churning out the type of music they know works (that pays the most); the same thing everyone else is creating. And leaving those other songs, those that the artist might actually want to make and the reason they do what they do, a financial dead-end. I don't think this is a good long-term plan and I am not happy that this is happening. I'd be equally unhappy if it happened to news, although maybe it's too late.
Fnoord 7y ago
Copyright infringement is simply not the same as theft since with theft the original owner loses their copy (one can look up both terms on Wikipedia for details). Any claim they are the very same with a straight face is dishonest at best.
- yonixw 7y ago
  I don't like this claim. It is very semantic. With your train of thoughts we can go very far. How about breaking patents? How about stealing your password? None of them should be illegal because you don't loose anything physical. Our law system sees theft as something that need adjusting to technology. So I can say with a straight face that in 2020, theft do include reading article that you didn't pay for.
  - iso1210 7y ago
    OP isn't saying copyright infringement shouldn't be illegal, just that it's not theft. Conflating depriving someone of their property with copying someone's work is bad -- it is not the same thing.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    I never said copyright infringement should be legal or endorsed (though it should be noted HN specifically allows posting workarounds for paywalls, but not complains about them); just that it is something different than theft. Calling it theft is dishonest. > How about breaking patents? We don't call it theft; we call that patent infringement. We have patent laws for that (in at least US and EU and probably [almost] everywhere in the world). > How about stealing your password? We don't call that theft, we call it "breaking into computers" (I only know the technical term for it in my native language, not English). If you use a password to log into an account you don't have legal access to, this is breaking into computers. We have laws for that (in at least US and EU and probably [almost] everywhere in the world). > Our law system sees theft as something that need adjusting to technology. No, it does not, it has different laws for all the three examples in this discussion, two of which you brought up. You clearly do not know or understand how your law works. The respective Wikipedia articles explain the differences.
dusted 7y ago
Clearly, if the websites didn't want you to read the article, they'd not send the content to your computer. I usually just F12 and remove the offending elements or their styling, so that I can read the article. There's only two reasons that's possible: Either the developer hated that they block information, and left a way through for people, or they're incompetent. I like to assume the best in people and believe the former to be the case.
- KarlKemp 7y ago
  It’s probably closer to price discrimination: they are obviously happy for people to read what they publish even without paying, as long as it’s only people who would not pay otherwise. Publishers aim for a barrier that is just high enough so that people with less time and more money would rather pay than circumvent them. It’s the exact same mechanism as supermarkets using coupons to grant people with lower financial means the opportunity to shop with them, knowing that their regular customers would die of embarrassment if their neighbors saw them clipping coupons.
- hamandcheese 7y ago
  > Clearly, if the websites didn't want you to read the article, they'd not send the content to your computer. If you use a news website (say the NYT) without plugins like the one linked, it’s blatantly obvious that this statement is not true. So, if you go out of your way to conceal who you are, or to masquerade as someone/something else (i.e. google bot), in order to trick a web server in to sending you bytes that you know they wouldn’t otherwise send you, don’t be surprised if some people accuse you of stealing.
  - Hamuko 7y ago
    The description says "referer set to Google", meaning it's just disguising you as someone who clicked on a Google search result. This begs the question if altering your browser's User-Agent is theft since some sites actually alter their prices depending on which browser or OS you use it on. Like, if a Mac/Safari user is expected to pay $99, but your Windows/Chrome User-Agent gets you a $89 deal, are you stealing $10?
Nextgrid 7y ago
The problem is that the publishers want to have their cake and eat it too. They’ll happily let Google index the pay walled articles but won’t let you read them for free, thus polluting search results. The expectation is that anything you see on Google (aka what the Googlebot was able to access without authentication) should be accessible for free without login or signup. These websites break that expectation, making search result pages unusable. Publishers want this behaviour, so they implement their paywalls in such a way that they trigger on browsers but not for search engine crawlers (usually because they are JS-based and simply obscure the content below it). This extension exploits that fact. Publishers are free to implement a true paywall where the server wouldn’t serve any content without auth (thus defeating this extension) but this also means restricting search engines, something they definitely don’t want. Finally, the “ethical” option of paying for the content is also out of the question for many due to privacy concerns. Many publishers have Facebook, Google Analytics and similar spyware on all their pages regardless of whether you’re a subscriber, so they will still track you except now you need to pay and provide validated billing details.
- iso1210 7y ago
  I'm sure in the past search engines checked for this type of behaviour and punished it. If you give a special 'optimised' page to a bot, but give something completely different to regular people, then that's a failing of the search engine.
  - kimi 7y ago
    Like Quora?
- KarlKemp 7y ago
  It’s quite a feat of logical contortion to somehow claim a privacy motive to legitimize your unwillingness to pay. Unless, that is, you never buy anything online. Because Netflix and airlines and food delivery and Amazon all run tracking on their sites, and a single vendor with Google Analytics would presumably be enough to let them tie your browser to your identity. In that case you’d still be excessively paranoid, but at least consistent about it.
tsukurimashou 7y ago
most of these websites are thieves too, they steal your data, while still displaying as much ads as they can, and they want you to pay to access their content as well, fuck that.
- KarlKemp 7y ago
  I’m pretty sure they hate the ads even more than you do. But margins in publishing are thin, and often negative. Nobody is earning money in that business, yet people are inventing this scenario of exploitation to have something to point to when they need to justify their acts to others or themselves. Google ran a trial to let you opt out of ads and pay the difference, exactly what people in these online discussions have always proclaimed to be waiting for. They got around a hundred takers. Turns out, nobody is willing to pay what it actually costs to produce the content they want to read. Local journalism is already dead in many regions, and there’s a study out there showing that corruption tends to increase in these cities, costing several times as much as the local paper ever did, not even including the non-monetary damages of the hollowing out of society.
  - tareqak 7y ago
    Google Contributor still exists today: https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing
- neltnerb 7y ago
  I canceled a honest to god subscription to a newspaper online because they decided that even if I was logged in it was necessary to subject me to dozens of 3rd party trackers. If all they wanted was information about what articles were doing well it'd be... okay, sure I guess though I wish they didn't decide what to publish based on that. But knowingly allowing their paying subscribers (and we're talking over a hundred dollars a year here for web-only) to be tracked by third parties is going too far. What's the point in paying for a subscription if they're going to sell my private data for pennies even when I'm giving them decent money for access? It's insulting. Now I just delete their cookies and read for free (and without tracking). I'd rather give them money, but after two years of paying for a subscription I don't feel too bad about it. I made clear to them why I was canceling my subscription -- if I'm paying you I'm not okay with you double dipping to sell my personal information. People viewing for free, okay, sure, I get it you want to make a little bit at least. Don't subject paying customers to this though. ... I say as I place orders on Amazon. Oh well. Being half way self-consistent is better than not at all.
zxcvbn4038 7y ago
Everyone just clears cache to reset the article counters anyway, this just makes it more convenient. If newspapers really want to lock down their content they are free to do so. If you’ve ever seen or used a Bloomberg terminal that is a great example of how to do it. However they know that will never work on a public scale as long as there is a single free source of news anywhere, so they don’t do that.
- what_ever 7y ago
  Unless you have a source for everyone, please don't talk for everyone.
serf 7y ago
Paywalls are a dishonest idea born from the necessity to game page-rank algorithms. There is nothing stopping these sites from creating login-only paid portals. They don't. Why? Ranking and the benefits. It seems like a "have my cake and eat it too." strategy, and i'm not too keen on supporting it, personally.. even more so given that many of these sites are just simply AP 'spin&regurgitate' sites. I'm waiting on big G to hit paywall sites harder in rankings, but I don't really see it in the cards. Here's hoping.
- heartbeats 7y ago
  This. Serious websites like the Financial Times just block you from reading articles altogether, without letting you first read the lede or anything. They still give archivers access because it's an effective form of price discrimination, but they have complete control over what they're doing.

For as much as I'd like to receive the utility of such a thing, I don't see how this is anything different than outright theft and therefore it should not be something promoted by any means.

peteretep 7y ago

I agree with you. However, if I was going to argue the counter point here, I’d note that I’m pretty happy with the effect that rampant piracy had in forcing adaptation of sensible pricing in the music industry. Enough of this kind of stuff and maybe it’ll force content publishers onto micropayment platforms.

TomWhitwell 7y ago
Musicians would disagree.
- tareqak 7y ago
  The only way to conclusively prove or disprove your claim would be to have several musicians/singers/songwriters open up their books to show where their wealth came from. From what I have heard over the years, artists and bands make a greater percentage of their wealth from doing concert tours (ticket sales) and selling merchandise than they do from actually selling music via record labels (I have no proof for this claim). My point is somewhat supported by the fact that some successful artists later going on to start their own record labels: if the relationship with the label was otherwise good and the issue was not money, then why make a significant capital investment in creating your own label?
KarlKemp 7y ago
Unlike the music industry, journalism has been decimated, especially on the local level. Even success stories with world-wide audiences often barely break even. And unlike music, professional journalism is a necessity for a function democracy. So I don’t quite see the hook for your Schadenfreude here.
- tareqak 7y ago
  I think calling 'peteretep’s emotion Schadenfreude is possibly incorrect [0]. I think all that 'peteretep is wishing for is a similar sort of evolution/enlightenment in journalism to that of the music industry. We can all agree that professional and ethical journalism is a necessary part of a well-functioning democracy as you point out. We can also agree that journalism has been decimated, especially at the local level, as you also pointed out. The observation that 'peteretep made about music piracy and its effect upon how music is monetized today is a fact: today, we have multiple streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, among others) and music stores (Apple Music, Beatport, Bandcamp(?) among others. The situation in the music industry remains imperfect, but 'peteretep’s claim that music piracy combined with new technology acted in concert as a forcing function to move the music marketplace closer to where producers and consumers want it to be seems sound. I for one consume the vast majority of my US political news from Hasan Piker knowing full well that he is a leftist [1]. He’s a full-time political commentator that streams on Twitch. Ever since I learned about him a few years ago, other political streamers have started streaming on Twitch and other platforms like YouTube. I bemoan the death of the local newspaper, but only because of the lack of coverage. Why can’t people with cellphone cameras stream a townhall or a city-planning meeting and let viewers decide the value of the livestream and any associated commentary? The long-celebrated journalistic institutions today have all in some way, shape, or form been “captured” by the political forces of the day. Did your organization report too much controversial news concerning the political sacred cows? Well then, you lose access, which is a death knell for such burgeoning organizations with high headcount and fixed costs. One last question: who hands out these press passes anyway because it’s not like you need a license in journalism to report the news? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude [1] http://twitch.tv/hasanabi http://twitch.tv/hasanabi
- rndgermandude 7y ago
  It has been decimated but not so much by pirates, but more so by the publishers themselves creating unbearable experiences, starting to give away everything creating a certain expectation (and now trying to reverse but running into the expectations they created), by the publishers being complacent and reactionary, by social media, by social media companies abusing their network effects, by "free" 24/7 news channels eating the newspaper's cake while at the same time discrediting the entire profession with their more-often-than-not sensationalist low quality reporting, by entrepreneurs backing news site "ventures" which then blasted and keep blasting everybody with low quality "free" clickbait, by publishers starting to imitate those low quality channels and sites (and their "free as in data hoarding" unsustainable models), predatory/hostile takeovers of local newspapers by "big media" and the associated "consolidating" of writers staff with adverse effects on quality, by "stakeholders" shifting from a "I am OK with only a so-so profit; this stuff is important" attitude to a full blown "we need to maximize profits at all costs", and the list goes on. I used to read the German Spiegel weekly, first the issues my dad bought, then later as I grew older buying their magazine. I stopped buying it years back, as it stopped being worth it, as the quality of the articles and investigative work plummeted, and article research turned into op-ed pieces.
kingosticks 7y ago
Are you talking in terms of album prices being reduced (have they??) or the ability to buy individual songs and essentially only pay for the parts of a musicians work you like? Encouraging publishers to use their influence over the content creators to focus on churning out the type of music they know works (that pays the most); the same thing everyone else is creating. And leaving those other songs, those that the artist might actually want to make and the reason they do what they do, a financial dead-end. I don't think this is a good long-term plan and I am not happy that this is happening. I'd be equally unhappy if it happened to news, although maybe it's too late.

Fnoord 7y ago

Copyright infringement is simply not the same as theft since with theft the original owner loses their copy (one can look up both terms on Wikipedia for details). Any claim they are the very same with a straight face is dishonest at best.

yonixw 7y ago
I don't like this claim. It is very semantic. With your train of thoughts we can go very far. How about breaking patents? How about stealing your password? None of them should be illegal because you don't loose anything physical. Our law system sees theft as something that need adjusting to technology. So I can say with a straight face that in 2020, theft do include reading article that you didn't pay for.
- iso1210 7y ago
  OP isn't saying copyright infringement shouldn't be illegal, just that it's not theft. Conflating depriving someone of their property with copying someone's work is bad -- it is not the same thing.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  I never said copyright infringement should be legal or endorsed (though it should be noted HN specifically allows posting workarounds for paywalls, but not complains about them); just that it is something different than theft. Calling it theft is dishonest. > How about breaking patents? We don't call it theft; we call that patent infringement. We have patent laws for that (in at least US and EU and probably [almost] everywhere in the world). > How about stealing your password? We don't call that theft, we call it "breaking into computers" (I only know the technical term for it in my native language, not English). If you use a password to log into an account you don't have legal access to, this is breaking into computers. We have laws for that (in at least US and EU and probably [almost] everywhere in the world). > Our law system sees theft as something that need adjusting to technology. No, it does not, it has different laws for all the three examples in this discussion, two of which you brought up. You clearly do not know or understand how your law works. The respective Wikipedia articles explain the differences.

dusted 7y ago

Clearly, if the websites didn't want you to read the article, they'd not send the content to your computer. I usually just F12 and remove the offending elements or their styling, so that I can read the article. There's only two reasons that's possible: Either the developer hated that they block information, and left a way through for people, or they're incompetent. I like to assume the best in people and believe the former to be the case.

KarlKemp 7y ago
It’s probably closer to price discrimination: they are obviously happy for people to read what they publish even without paying, as long as it’s only people who would not pay otherwise. Publishers aim for a barrier that is just high enough so that people with less time and more money would rather pay than circumvent them. It’s the exact same mechanism as supermarkets using coupons to grant people with lower financial means the opportunity to shop with them, knowing that their regular customers would die of embarrassment if their neighbors saw them clipping coupons.
hamandcheese 7y ago
> Clearly, if the websites didn't want you to read the article, they'd not send the content to your computer. If you use a news website (say the NYT) without plugins like the one linked, it’s blatantly obvious that this statement is not true. So, if you go out of your way to conceal who you are, or to masquerade as someone/something else (i.e. google bot), in order to trick a web server in to sending you bytes that you know they wouldn’t otherwise send you, don’t be surprised if some people accuse you of stealing.
- Hamuko 7y ago
  The description says "referer set to Google", meaning it's just disguising you as someone who clicked on a Google search result. This begs the question if altering your browser's User-Agent is theft since some sites actually alter their prices depending on which browser or OS you use it on. Like, if a Mac/Safari user is expected to pay $99, but your Windows/Chrome User-Agent gets you a $89 deal, are you stealing $10?

Nextgrid 7y ago

The problem is that the publishers want to have their cake and eat it too. They’ll happily let Google index the pay walled articles but won’t let you read them for free, thus polluting search results. The expectation is that anything you see on Google (aka what the Googlebot was able to access without authentication) should be accessible for free without login or signup. These websites break that expectation, making search result pages unusable. Publishers want this behaviour, so they implement their paywalls in such a way that they trigger on browsers but not for search engine crawlers (usually because they are JS-based and simply obscure the content below it). This extension exploits that fact. Publishers are free to implement a true paywall where the server wouldn’t serve any content without auth (thus defeating this extension) but this also means restricting search engines, something they definitely don’t want. Finally, the “ethical” option of paying for the content is also out of the question for many due to privacy concerns. Many publishers have Facebook, Google Analytics and similar spyware on all their pages regardless of whether you’re a subscriber, so they will still track you except now you need to pay and provide validated billing details.

iso1210 7y ago
I'm sure in the past search engines checked for this type of behaviour and punished it. If you give a special 'optimised' page to a bot, but give something completely different to regular people, then that's a failing of the search engine.
- kimi 7y ago
  Like Quora?
KarlKemp 7y ago
It’s quite a feat of logical contortion to somehow claim a privacy motive to legitimize your unwillingness to pay. Unless, that is, you never buy anything online. Because Netflix and airlines and food delivery and Amazon all run tracking on their sites, and a single vendor with Google Analytics would presumably be enough to let them tie your browser to your identity. In that case you’d still be excessively paranoid, but at least consistent about it.

tsukurimashou 7y ago

most of these websites are thieves too, they steal your data, while still displaying as much ads as they can, and they want you to pay to access their content as well, fuck that.

KarlKemp 7y ago
I’m pretty sure they hate the ads even more than you do. But margins in publishing are thin, and often negative. Nobody is earning money in that business, yet people are inventing this scenario of exploitation to have something to point to when they need to justify their acts to others or themselves. Google ran a trial to let you opt out of ads and pay the difference, exactly what people in these online discussions have always proclaimed to be waiting for. They got around a hundred takers. Turns out, nobody is willing to pay what it actually costs to produce the content they want to read. Local journalism is already dead in many regions, and there’s a study out there showing that corruption tends to increase in these cities, costing several times as much as the local paper ever did, not even including the non-monetary damages of the hollowing out of society.
- tareqak 7y ago
  Google Contributor still exists today: https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing
neltnerb 7y ago
I canceled a honest to god subscription to a newspaper online because they decided that even if I was logged in it was necessary to subject me to dozens of 3rd party trackers. If all they wanted was information about what articles were doing well it'd be... okay, sure I guess though I wish they didn't decide what to publish based on that. But knowingly allowing their paying subscribers (and we're talking over a hundred dollars a year here for web-only) to be tracked by third parties is going too far. What's the point in paying for a subscription if they're going to sell my private data for pennies even when I'm giving them decent money for access? It's insulting. Now I just delete their cookies and read for free (and without tracking). I'd rather give them money, but after two years of paying for a subscription I don't feel too bad about it. I made clear to them why I was canceling my subscription -- if I'm paying you I'm not okay with you double dipping to sell my personal information. People viewing for free, okay, sure, I get it you want to make a little bit at least. Don't subject paying customers to this though. ... I say as I place orders on Amazon. Oh well. Being half way self-consistent is better than not at all.

zxcvbn4038 7y ago

Everyone just clears cache to reset the article counters anyway, this just makes it more convenient. If newspapers really want to lock down their content they are free to do so. If you’ve ever seen or used a Bloomberg terminal that is a great example of how to do it. However they know that will never work on a public scale as long as there is a single free source of news anywhere, so they don’t do that.

what_ever 7y ago
Unless you have a source for everyone, please don't talk for everyone.

serf 7y ago

Paywalls are a dishonest idea born from the necessity to game page-rank algorithms. There is nothing stopping these sites from creating login-only paid portals. They don't. Why? Ranking and the benefits. It seems like a "have my cake and eat it too." strategy, and i'm not too keen on supporting it, personally.. even more so given that many of these sites are just simply AP 'spin&regurgitate' sites. I'm waiting on big G to hit paywall sites harder in rankings, but I don't really see it in the cards. Here's hoping.

heartbeats 7y ago
This. Serious websites like the Financial Times just block you from reading articles altogether, without letting you first read the lede or anything. They still give archivers access because it's an effective form of price discrimination, but they have complete control over what they're doing.