Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

That's an entirely serious suggestion. I'm not arguing that what you're doing is illegal. I have all sorts of qualms with copyright and its enforcement myself. If I were "copyright czar", movies would get three years, and newspapers maybe a week.

But if we wish for copyright-holders to respect the rights of internet users, it would seem to be a winning proposition to maybe not actively work against their attempts to find a compromise.

And a "soft paywall" that allows you to read a dozen or so articles per month without subscription seems to be jus that: a compromise, and a reasonable one at that.

What do you expect to be the long-term outcome of bypassing such mechanisms? I have trouble of thinking of anything but "soft paywalls" turning into "hard paywalls". Then, we'll be left with the maybe one or two publications we subscribe to. How can such an outcome be in anyone's interest?

I know you can bypass these schemes. Yes, they are laughable. I know ads are sometimes annoying. I know large swaths of the press have earned your scorn because they, like, use the wrong JS framework. Or something.

But I still don't understand this attitude that appears to go even further than just "I want it for free" to an almost gleeful appreciation of vandalism destroying the foundations of democratic societies.

Man standing on the sidewalk outside a store yells into the store at the shopkeeper “hey there, can I have some free fish?”

Shopkeeper yells back “sure!” and tosses a fish to the man on the sidewalk.

Add more yelling back and forth for TLS handshake.

At this point, the man on the sidewalk can do whatever he wants with the fish. It was freely given.

If you present this as a plug-in that allows you to view websites as the Google bot views them, for educational and debugging purposes, there is no problem. You can give the fact that it won’t see the paywall as an example. It’s actually useful for that purpose: you are not lying. It’s just that most people will install the plugin for its ‘side effects’. Their use of it will still be illegal, but the intent will not be illegal. Cf. Firearms, crypto, drugs, ...

(I say this as someone that pays for various journalistic sources and I encourage everyone to pay for at least their three favorite sources)

My two cents is that advertisement is what is killing journalism.

YouTube, for example, can show advertisements for well known companies in videos about Anti-vaccination, far-right conspiracies, etc. without consequences.

Why is that? Because all that happens in the privacy of your own computer. Usually any newspaper that publicly have printed such bullshit in their pages will be dead. Public will react to it.

What is different? Facebook, YouTube, etc. are personalized. You are shown what you are interested in without public accountability. Niche radical content gets a lot of views for its own controversial nature. Views and money.

Who wants to investigate, hire good writers and expend the money that it takes to write a good article when you can hire some one without ethics for a fraction of the price and get as many or more views as radicalization grows?

YouTube, Facebook and others say that they are not responsible of the content they offer. I think that it should be true for things like comments. But for the monetized content they are 100% responsible of incentivizing that radicalization and killing good journalism in the process.