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Most other things are fully a "take it or leave" it deal - pay or you can't get access. If I take food from the grocery store without paying then they will cal

Most other things are fully a "take it or leave" it deal - pay or you can't get access. If I take food from the grocery store without paying then they will call the police. Most ad supported websites aren't like that. They let anybody access the content and only then try to insert ads. That's like trying to close the barn door after the horse has left, and it's a fundamental property of the medium of web publishing. You can do things to push back against it - put the site behind a username/password and block users who aren't looking at the ads - but this prevents people from discovering the site in the first place. This is ultimately a mismatch between the desires of the business and the medium they have decided to use, and it's on _them_ to figure that out, not end users.

AlienRobot 3y ago
I don't believe that. An image or music in the computer medium is just bits. It's still a copyright infringement to copy it and publish it without license. Text is just bits. So what is the point of GPL? The goods in a shop are just atoms. There's no law of physics that stops be from just taking all the stuff I want. Just because the medium allows you to do something that doesn't mean it's right to do it. Anyway what do you propose? That every website with ads stops using the web, creates their own non-standards-compliant browser with their own transfer protocol, and tells users to just use that? You can still reverse-engineer and crack it, because everything in a computer is just bits. They've done something similar with smartphone apps and everyone hates that. Then what instead? If you decided you can just do whatever you want because of the medium, the business will seek methods beyond the medium to get what they want. You'll have to pay for subscription to access any and all content. And guess what, users hate that too! And that still won't stop users from just abusing archive.org and other proxies to copy paste entire paywalled articles to post it on the internet. Blatant copyright infringement. Thinking they're right because it's still just bits in the end. Honestly the more I think about it the more it feels like users just think they're entitled to free content and it's impossible to satisfy them with anything else.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  Stop putting shit on the open web if you don't want people to be able to view it how they choose on a browser they choose. That's not even a viewer abusing the protocol, that's specifically how the web was designed.

AlienRobot 3y ago

I don't believe that. An image or music in the computer medium is just bits. It's still a copyright infringement to copy it and publish it without license. Text is just bits. So what is the point of GPL? The goods in a shop are just atoms. There's no law of physics that stops be from just taking all the stuff I want. Just because the medium allows you to do something that doesn't mean it's right to do it. Anyway what do you propose? That every website with ads stops using the web, creates their own non-standards-compliant browser with their own transfer protocol, and tells users to just use that? You can still reverse-engineer and crack it, because everything in a computer is just bits. They've done something similar with smartphone apps and everyone hates that. Then what instead? If you decided you can just do whatever you want because of the medium, the business will seek methods beyond the medium to get what they want. You'll have to pay for subscription to access any and all content. And guess what, users hate that too! And that still won't stop users from just abusing archive.org and other proxies to copy paste entire paywalled articles to post it on the internet. Blatant copyright infringement. Thinking they're right because it's still just bits in the end. Honestly the more I think about it the more it feels like users just think they're entitled to free content and it's impossible to satisfy them with anything else.

phone8675309 3y ago
Stop putting shit on the open web if you don't want people to be able to view it how they choose on a browser they choose. That's not even a viewer abusing the protocol, that's specifically how the web was designed.