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Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

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Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#151

Post by Veen »

the8472 wrote: post #149
Veen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminals don't perform a useful service for society. Journalists do. Journalism is flawed, but flawed journalism is better than no journalism.

That's assuming that laws are the perfect arbiter of what is useful and what is not. Some useful and moral activities are or used to be criminal acts.

How is that remotely relevant to the topic under discussion? I mean, it's true that laws are sometimes unethical or mistaken. But that has nothing to do with whether journalism is useful and worth protecting.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#152

Post by dvogel »

_em6m wrote: post #138
nextgens wrote: post #114

I am the author of that add-on ... what would you do in my shoes ? - provide an XPI (that will only benefit the few since the side-loading process is made awkwarder at every point release) ? - fight it ? If so, on what grounds and how ? - something else ?

How about stop the development? The fact that you can break the paywall (easily) doesn't give you the right to do it. Current laws (in that country) state that it's ilegal, so why do you insist in doing it?

It's far from clear that draw-on-top paywalls qualify for the protection offered by either the DMCA or the CFAA. Even if they did, the mechanisms by which this specific extension works are indistinguishable actions users take for many other reasons. The legal notice is a gamble that the extension author doesn't want to spend the money to find out the hard way.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#153

Post by Confusion »

dao- wrote: post #143
Confusion wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rename the plugin and change the description. The message from Mozilla states that the problem is the intent of the plugin. The technological measures it actually takes are not illegal per sé, but are illegal when used to circumvent paywalls (of course IANAL). 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. Yo…

Your first paragraph reads a bit crazy and I imagine that's why you're being downvoted, but as you're expanding your idea in the second paragraph I think you might have a point.

Thanks, reread and adjusted it a bit. Better like this?

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#154

Post by dvogel »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #121
nextgens wrote: post #114

I am the author of that add-on ... what would you do in my shoes ? - provide an XPI (that will only benefit the few since the side-loading process is made awkwarder at every point release) ? - fight it ? If so, on what grounds and how ? - something else ?

Stop enabling the destruction of journalism? 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…

Multiple news orgs have stated in public that they don't care about paywalls bypassers because they put up the paywall to convert only the most amenable readers. This is very similar to the paper distribution model where an extreme minority of subscribers represented the majority of revenue, due to extreme discounts and other subsidies given to most readers.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#155

Post by Confusion »

giornogiovanna wrote: post #62

This extension just seems to strip tracking data and pretend to be a Google bot. It baffles me that this is somehow concerning enough to be taken down. And anyway, isn't making exemptions for Google's robots sort-of against their policy? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355

You are not allowed to circumvent paywalls, just like you are not allowed to circumvent locks, no matter how easy they are to circumvent. As far as I have always understood, you may publish a locksmithing guide, even an “entering your home when locked out” guide, but not a “how to commit burglary” guide.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#156

Post by throwaway2048 »

dao- wrote: post #135
kgwxd wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raly all your users to bug Mozilla about unbreaking side-loading. If addons really isnt supposed be a walled garden as they claim, they should be willing to open a discussion with the community about how to open things up so we can avoid legal bullying like this.

It's not gonna happen. Firefox would be dead by now if it still allowed bad or incompetent actors to make Firefox unusable (as in slow, unstable, and btw insecure), because users wouldn't keep up with that for too long. They'd just use another browser. This may be okay with you for now because you know how to protect yourself against malware, but in the long run Mozilla needs market share to stay relevant and be able…

This is a really bad argument that can be used to justify any anti user feature whatsoever.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#157

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

DC-3 wrote: post #61
trollied wrote: post #16

Just a tangent for you all - does anyone envisage a 2nd parallel internet emerging? Not tor-like, an actual completely separate network?

Possibly in the form of a very strict, very semantic, almost RSS-like subset of HTML? Something that almost resembles the reader view many modern browsers will convert articles into?

Gopher? Everything old is new again:)

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#158

Post by Koshkin »

tomp wrote: post #130
shaki-dora wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Criminals also just want to survive. That doesn't make their immoral business model legitimate.

Difference is, while we do want the publishers to survive as publishers, we do not want the criminals to survive as criminals.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#159

Post by dao- »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #156
dao- wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not gonna happen. Firefox would be dead by now if it still allowed bad or incompetent actors to make Firefox unusable (as in slow, unstable, and btw insecure), because users wouldn't keep up with that for too long. They'd just use another browser. This may be okay with you for now because you know how to protect yourself against malware, but in the long run Mozilla needs market share to stay relevant and be able…

This is a really bad argument that can be used to justify any anti user feature whatsoever.

No? First of all, I'm saying that allowing sideloading is actually hostile to the majority of users, and I'm also saying this threatened the very survival of Mozilla, so this needs to be part of the consideration.

Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

#160

Post by kingofhdds »

dao- wrote: post #135
kgwxd wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raly all your users to bug Mozilla about unbreaking side-loading. If addons really isnt supposed be a walled garden as they claim, they should be willing to open a discussion with the community about how to open things up so we can avoid legal bullying like this.

It's not gonna happen. Firefox would be dead by now if it still allowed bad or incompetent actors to make Firefox unusable (as in slow, unstable, and btw insecure), because users wouldn't keep up with that for too long. They'd just use another browser. This may be okay with you for now because you know how to protect yourself against malware, but in the long run Mozilla needs market share to stay relevant and be able…

Significant part of FF's userbase decided in its favor exactly because of choice of third-party addons.
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