This breaks the social contract of the web. If you publish on the web (over HTTP) using HTML (with or without css+js) then you respect the concept of a User-Agent that renders the content on behalf of the user. If you wish to get around this then create another file format and protocol and application/plugin to do so — one that enforces the DRM for the owner. Don’t take agency away from User-Agent.
Alternatively, the add-ons break the social contract, whereby content creators request payment for their content. If you visit stuff on the web, you respect the concept of a social contract between you and the provide. Don’t try to circumvent their wishes.
Why aren't they using proper access control, then?
This is not a free speech issue at all, nor are the EU regulations free speech issues. The problem with these laws and their interpretation is that they target the wrong organizations and technologies. If a website is illegal, it needs to be taken down by police. Instead, idiot judges rule that certain DNS entries should be blocked. If you shouldn't be allowed to read some pay-walled journal, then the publisher has t…
“Just take down the website” is disingenuous. You, and I, and those idiot judges all know it’s often much harder, and sometimes impossible, to get to the website owners. “Abolish all copyright” is a legitimate opinion. It’s wrong,of course. But it’s possible to discuss it. Don’t demean yourself and others by starting discussions with disingenuous arguments.
I am not sure abolishing copyright is "wrong," given that copyright developed as a response to a major shift in how written material was disseminated (the invention of the printing press), and that we are now seeing another major shift. A lot of the problems being argued about today, including the issue of paywall circumvention add-ons, have parallels to the historical arguments over printing. Given that copyright replaced a previous system of regulation in response to a new technology, why would we not want to replace copyright with something totally different that is better suited to a technology that has largely replaced printing?
Just a tangent for you all - does anyone envisage a 2nd parallel internet emerging? Not tor-like, an actual completely separate network?
That’s quite a huge tangent. Why? And what could it possibly have to do with the article?
Huge tangent indeed. If only someone would open a thread or mailing list to discuss the idea . . .
The harrowing thing is, it really does look as though we were / are in the wild west days of internet comms. The more tech savy business and corporations have become, the more they have looked to monetize and lock down the web. This is not what it was supposed to be.
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.
They 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.
Then 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?
This breaks the social contract of the web. If you publish on the web (over HTTP) using HTML (with or without css+js) then you respect the concept of a User-Agent that renders the content on behalf of the user. If you wish to get around this then create another file format and protocol and application/plugin to do so — one that enforces the DRM for the owner. Don’t take agency away from User-Agent.
Alternatively, the add-ons break the social contract, whereby content creators request payment for their content. If you visit stuff on the web, you respect the concept of a social contract between you and the provide. Don’t try to circumvent their wishes.
They can request it. I don’t necessarily agree to it.
Does Mozilla need to actually host the extension? I'm guessing that that is the problem here. Couldn't they just cryptographically sign it, and leave the distribution to a P2P technology like BitTorrent?
I am not sure it would make a difference to the courts.
Firefox is just a platform to run addons, like Windows is OS to run programs. Do you think that Microsoft should curate software allowed for users to run?
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.
They 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.
Their business model has been broken for years. It’s not incumbent on me to help them survive.
I mostly agree with you, but the problem with illegals websites is often that they are illegal in a country but hosted in another. So you can’t really send your own police taking down servers in other countries. So for the DNS blocking it works because it blocks casual users of those website (I’m thinking torrent or streaming sites essentially). Of course when you know a bit how it works you use international DNS. An…
One country cannot police Internet, otherwise China will shut it down tomorrow. If a site is legal in the country where it is hosted, then it is legal and that's it, connecting to Internet assumes you obey this simple rule.
Well, seems like some people don't actually "obey" this rule you just invented.
And, for now, they have that other invented rule on their side, the rule of law.
How is blocking paywalls different from blocking ads? I hope that someone will fork Firefox and remove that code which prevents users from installing any addons.
They were told to not anymore host the extension on AMO, but it's still signed by Mozilla (and I doubt they would stop signing future versions), so you can still download and install the extension from elsewhere. Also, Mozilla themselves provide a "fork", i.e. builds compiled with the corresponding flag, that allow unsigned extensions to be installed, after you set "xpinstall.signatures.required" in about:config to f…