6 ms·

HN cracks me up. We are largely a demographic of people that make money from selling our IP and yet for some reason many of us are pretty brazen about our effor

HN cracks me up. We are largely a demographic of people that make money from selling our IP and yet for some reason many of us are pretty brazen about our efforts to circumvent payment for others' IP. I'll admit that I incognito my way around a paywall from time to time, but I at least have the decency to feel kinda salty about it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tablespoon 4y ago
> HN cracks me up. We are largely a demographic of people that make money from selling our IP and yet for some reason many of us are pretty brazen about our efforts to circumvent payment for others' IP. Eh, that's not really correct. Most of us actually make money from creating IP for others to own, so it's not nearly as hypocritical as you imply. IMHO, the brazenness is cultural momentum from the expectations formed during the heady 90s "information wants to be free" period and the resulting long period where paywalls were rare. Honestly, it probably would have been better for everyone if everything had been pay-walled from the beginning.
- OrvalWintermute 4y ago
  > Most of us actually make money from creating IP for others to own, so it's not nearly as hypocritical as you imply. Actually, I think most of us provide services, and it is a big mix. > many of us are pretty brazen about our efforts to circumvent payment for others' IP. Let me start with a link on Elsevier https://openatcuny.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015/05/20/elsevier-ever-more-evil/ https://openatcuny.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015/05/20/elsevier-e... Much of what is said about Elsevier, the worst offender, is true to a lesser extent in other paywalls. I don't believe that paywalls are Moral, Ethical, or Fair. I also believe that paywalls can be discrimatory, and deceptive. This goes along with a general critique I have of IP. Paywalls regularly use others' content, without compensating them. In many cases, content thieves likes Elsevier take content that is funded by our tax dollars, and hide it behind paywalls, or expensive subscriptions. I paid for that. This is stealing from me. IP is really a fake term that conflates a number of things, some of which are just ideas or math. It also regularly cheats basic things like "Right of First Sale" through BS such as licensing/bundling/etc Paywalls regularly permit search engines to index their content, but when you go to see the content that was openly indexed, they block you, and hit you up for funding. This is a bait & switch. Some paywalls vacillate between business models intentionally to get your personal data, sell it, while using ads, then go full paywall after the sale has already been made of info. I think there is a social contract underpinning communications, that we were always free to redistribute them. But the "Communication thieves" Paywalls don't want that through the cottage industry that grew to exploit these gaps. If we think of the negative impacts of all these paywalls to the 3rd world and increasing digitization, talk about a horrible digital divide emerging? Signed, Militant Anti-Paywall Revolutionary
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > Much of what is said about Elsevier, the worst offender, is true to a lesser extent in other paywalls. Honestly, I think it's a mistake reason about all paywalls from the example of Elsevier's paywalls. There are a lot of unique aspects to the production of academic work that are not present in other areas. Revenue is needed to fund the creation of other kinds of work, such as news reporting, and for stuff like that, paywalls are needed because other free-access revenue models frankly didn't work.
- azinman2 4y ago
  If everything had been paywalled from the beginning, the internet would have been less successful. Most of that free information was possible because there was enough print subscription and personal ads money to subsidize it all. That is no longer true.
ImminentDugong 4y ago
Yet this is called Hacker News, and hackers usually like to, well, hack and work around stuff just because they can. It's one of the nice things of knowing how technology works, and as long as it's doable only by technical people it's probably not a big issue for IP / content creators (I'm considering adding an extension from source a technical task). As long as you don't commoditize piracy too much, it's fine.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  > As long as you don't commoditize piracy too much, it's fine. Still, I wouldn't call that piracy at all. As a non subscriber they open their door to you, offer you a counter and tell you you can lurk anything until the counter say you have to leave or pay. But that counter only really work if you accept to put batteries inside and turn it on and nobody is really bothering to check. Also they chose to use drug dealers methods knowing very well that network effects will make you knock at their door on a regular basis. Choosing to ignore that counter would be unethical/rude the same way taking photo in a museum that prohibit them is. But none of this is piracy.
batch12 4y ago
I guess I am a horrible human being. I don't feel bad at all blocking ads, bypassing client side modal popups, or viewing data happily provided to search engines with the intent of giving me a taste. To be fair, I mostly just don't read paywalled articles.
Mordisquitos 4y ago
It's not our problem if media sites send us the full content of their articles and expect our browsers to implement their arcane decisions whether to magnanimously allow us to see it this time or not. If they don't like it, it's trivial to put their content behind a requirement to log in with a validated account. In fact, it's even easier than what they do now! Oh, but wait, that won't play with the SEO, user engagement, social media sharing, dark patterns to entice users to pay by offering them a few crumbs now and then... Again, not my problem. They do them, I'll do me.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
  This is quite a lot of gymnastics you're doing here to justify to yourself why you don't want to pay to read people's news stories.
  - Mordisquitos 4y ago
    And yet I do pay subscriptions for the news and publications whose content I find good enough to be interested in what they will publish next, or if I support what they stand for. However, I feel no reason to pay subscriptions for one-off articles that may interest me from the myriad of media companies that I don't care to follow for one reason or another if they send me the content anyway. Their business model is not my problem.
    - VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
      You can just say you don't want to pay for it and would rather steal. No need to try to find some moral justification for it.
      - laserlight 4y ago
        Do you have a legal reference that states bypassing paywalls is stealing?
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Sure, there are a lot of moral gymnastics going on here. Seems we don't really have a good understanding of what goes wrong with paywalled links. For me, as an author, I find myself in a ridiculous situation when I want to share with friends works I've done for a site that uses paywalls but doesn't pay me (yes this happens in the real world of publishing). So I am ambivalent and often share a link along with instructions on how to bypass access controls. But more generally I am irritated by links other people share, such as here on HN, that are paywalled. I'd rather not know about them than experience the frustration and time-waste of following them. So there is a contradiction/tension at the heart of digital publishing, that creators, critics, researchers and commenters really want exposure/reach more than they want (or get) money. That said, paywalls are not the only problem and are more understandable than sites that block Tor, use Cloudflare, Geo-block, or those brain-dead ISPs or university sysadmins who block sites based on broad keywords so that almost any kind of research is impossible without tunnelling out past their crappy firewalls.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nonameiguess 4y ago
I don't really buy this. I think I technically have subscriptions to both the Washington Post and New York Times that my wife purchased that I assume are valid for an entire household, and I used to subscribe to the LA Times when I was younger and read a physical newspaper. The consumption model now just isn't comparable, though. If I was regularly going to my city newspaper's website to figure out what was going on, I'd pay them. But that isn't what is happening. Instead, their links are getting spammed all over the web to link aggregation sites like Hacker News, mixed in with links to non-paywalled content, from a universe of thousand of providers, many of which provide all of the content for free. Subscribing to one newspaper is fine, but there is no conceivable world in which I'm going to purchase subscriptions to every paywalled site I ever encounter a link to, especially when I usually don't know before clicking that it is paywalled. Nonetheless, being able to meaningfully participate in the conversations generated by the article on link aggregator sites like this that provide comment sections means I need to read the articles, doesn't it? If the only options for consistently being able to do that are either 1) purchase 300+ distinct subscriptions to sites where I have no idea if I'm ever going back again, or 2) bypass the paywalls, I'm going to bypass the paywalls.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Nonetheless, being able to meaningfully participate in the conversations generated by the article on link aggregator sites like this that provide comment sections means I need to read the articles, doesn't it? If the only options for consistently being able to do that are either 1) purchase 300+ distinct subscriptions to sites where I have no idea if I'm ever going back again, or 2) bypass the paywalls, I'm going to bypass the paywalls. You're looking at it purely from the perspective of a consumer, which misses pretty significant parts of the picture. Someone needed to get paid to produced a lot of that content, and in many cases they won't have the revenue to do that without a paywall. Your justification isn't too different from one that goes "if I want to meaningfully participate in American society, I need a car. However I don't want to pay $30,000+ for one, so if I can pick locks and hotwire a car to get the transportation I want, I'll do that instead of paying."
  - Mordisquitos 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tablespoon 4y ago

> HN cracks me up. We are largely a demographic of people that make money from selling our IP and yet for some reason many of us are pretty brazen about our efforts to circumvent payment for others' IP. Eh, that's not really correct. Most of us actually make money from creating IP for others to own, so it's not nearly as hypocritical as you imply. IMHO, the brazenness is cultural momentum from the expectations formed during the heady 90s "information wants to be free" period and the resulting long period where paywalls were rare. Honestly, it probably would have been better for everyone if everything had been pay-walled from the beginning.

OrvalWintermute 4y ago
> Most of us actually make money from creating IP for others to own, so it's not nearly as hypocritical as you imply. Actually, I think most of us provide services, and it is a big mix. > many of us are pretty brazen about our efforts to circumvent payment for others' IP. Let me start with a link on Elsevier https://openatcuny.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015/05/20/elsevier-ever-more-evil/ https://openatcuny.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015/05/20/elsevier-e... Much of what is said about Elsevier, the worst offender, is true to a lesser extent in other paywalls. I don't believe that paywalls are Moral, Ethical, or Fair. I also believe that paywalls can be discrimatory, and deceptive. This goes along with a general critique I have of IP. Paywalls regularly use others' content, without compensating them. In many cases, content thieves likes Elsevier take content that is funded by our tax dollars, and hide it behind paywalls, or expensive subscriptions. I paid for that. This is stealing from me. IP is really a fake term that conflates a number of things, some of which are just ideas or math. It also regularly cheats basic things like "Right of First Sale" through BS such as licensing/bundling/etc Paywalls regularly permit search engines to index their content, but when you go to see the content that was openly indexed, they block you, and hit you up for funding. This is a bait & switch. Some paywalls vacillate between business models intentionally to get your personal data, sell it, while using ads, then go full paywall after the sale has already been made of info. I think there is a social contract underpinning communications, that we were always free to redistribute them. But the "Communication thieves" Paywalls don't want that through the cottage industry that grew to exploit these gaps. If we think of the negative impacts of all these paywalls to the 3rd world and increasing digitization, talk about a horrible digital divide emerging? Signed, Militant Anti-Paywall Revolutionary
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Much of what is said about Elsevier, the worst offender, is true to a lesser extent in other paywalls. Honestly, I think it's a mistake reason about all paywalls from the example of Elsevier's paywalls. There are a lot of unique aspects to the production of academic work that are not present in other areas. Revenue is needed to fund the creation of other kinds of work, such as news reporting, and for stuff like that, paywalls are needed because other free-access revenue models frankly didn't work.
azinman2 4y ago
If everything had been paywalled from the beginning, the internet would have been less successful. Most of that free information was possible because there was enough print subscription and personal ads money to subsidize it all. That is no longer true.

ImminentDugong 4y ago

Yet this is called Hacker News, and hackers usually like to, well, hack and work around stuff just because they can. It's one of the nice things of knowing how technology works, and as long as it's doable only by technical people it's probably not a big issue for IP / content creators (I'm considering adding an extension from source a technical task). As long as you don't commoditize piracy too much, it's fine.

prmoustache 4y ago
> As long as you don't commoditize piracy too much, it's fine. Still, I wouldn't call that piracy at all. As a non subscriber they open their door to you, offer you a counter and tell you you can lurk anything until the counter say you have to leave or pay. But that counter only really work if you accept to put batteries inside and turn it on and nobody is really bothering to check. Also they chose to use drug dealers methods knowing very well that network effects will make you knock at their door on a regular basis. Choosing to ignore that counter would be unethical/rude the same way taking photo in a museum that prohibit them is. But none of this is piracy.

batch12 4y ago

I guess I am a horrible human being. I don't feel bad at all blocking ads, bypassing client side modal popups, or viewing data happily provided to search engines with the intent of giving me a taste. To be fair, I mostly just don't read paywalled articles.

Mordisquitos 4y ago

It's not our problem if media sites send us the full content of their articles and expect our browsers to implement their arcane decisions whether to magnanimously allow us to see it this time or not. If they don't like it, it's trivial to put their content behind a requirement to log in with a validated account. In fact, it's even easier than what they do now! Oh, but wait, that won't play with the SEO, user engagement, social media sharing, dark patterns to entice users to pay by offering them a few crumbs now and then... Again, not my problem. They do them, I'll do me.

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
This is quite a lot of gymnastics you're doing here to justify to yourself why you don't want to pay to read people's news stories.
- Mordisquitos 4y ago
  And yet I do pay subscriptions for the news and publications whose content I find good enough to be interested in what they will publish next, or if I support what they stand for. However, I feel no reason to pay subscriptions for one-off articles that may interest me from the myriad of media companies that I don't care to follow for one reason or another if they send me the content anyway. Their business model is not my problem.
  - VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
    You can just say you don't want to pay for it and would rather steal. No need to try to find some moral justification for it.
    - laserlight 4y ago
      Do you have a legal reference that states bypassing paywalls is stealing?
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Sure, there are a lot of moral gymnastics going on here. Seems we don't really have a good understanding of what goes wrong with paywalled links. For me, as an author, I find myself in a ridiculous situation when I want to share with friends works I've done for a site that uses paywalls but doesn't pay me (yes this happens in the real world of publishing). So I am ambivalent and often share a link along with instructions on how to bypass access controls. But more generally I am irritated by links other people share, such as here on HN, that are paywalled. I'd rather not know about them than experience the frustration and time-waste of following them. So there is a contradiction/tension at the heart of digital publishing, that creators, critics, researchers and commenters really want exposure/reach more than they want (or get) money. That said, paywalls are not the only problem and are more understandable than sites that block Tor, use Cloudflare, Geo-block, or those brain-dead ISPs or university sysadmins who block sites based on broad keywords so that almost any kind of research is impossible without tunnelling out past their crappy firewalls.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nonameiguess 4y ago

I don't really buy this. I think I technically have subscriptions to both the Washington Post and New York Times that my wife purchased that I assume are valid for an entire household, and I used to subscribe to the LA Times when I was younger and read a physical newspaper. The consumption model now just isn't comparable, though. If I was regularly going to my city newspaper's website to figure out what was going on, I'd pay them. But that isn't what is happening. Instead, their links are getting spammed all over the web to link aggregation sites like Hacker News, mixed in with links to non-paywalled content, from a universe of thousand of providers, many of which provide all of the content for free. Subscribing to one newspaper is fine, but there is no conceivable world in which I'm going to purchase subscriptions to every paywalled site I ever encounter a link to, especially when I usually don't know before clicking that it is paywalled. Nonetheless, being able to meaningfully participate in the conversations generated by the article on link aggregator sites like this that provide comment sections means I need to read the articles, doesn't it? If the only options for consistently being able to do that are either 1) purchase 300+ distinct subscriptions to sites where I have no idea if I'm ever going back again, or 2) bypass the paywalls, I'm going to bypass the paywalls.

tablespoon 4y ago
> Nonetheless, being able to meaningfully participate in the conversations generated by the article on link aggregator sites like this that provide comment sections means I need to read the articles, doesn't it? If the only options for consistently being able to do that are either 1) purchase 300+ distinct subscriptions to sites where I have no idea if I'm ever going back again, or 2) bypass the paywalls, I'm going to bypass the paywalls. You're looking at it purely from the perspective of a consumer, which misses pretty significant parts of the picture. Someone needed to get paid to produced a lot of that content, and in many cases they won't have the revenue to do that without a paywall. Your justification isn't too different from one that goes "if I want to meaningfully participate in American society, I need a car. However I don't want to pay $30,000+ for one, so if I can pick locks and hotwire a car to get the transportation I want, I'll do that instead of paying."
- Mordisquitos 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]