Just a tangent for you all - does anyone envisage a 2nd parallel internet emerging? Not tor-like, an actual completely separate network?
I do, for sure China is already planning this.
Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons
241–250 of 405 posts
Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
A paywall is not a lock. It is code that someone else wants to ship to my computer to run. It's up to me to decide what parts of it I run or not.
No, it’s not. The jurisprudence is pretty clear.
the jurisprudence of whom? In my own jurisprudence paywalls are viruses.
Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it’s not. The jurisprudence is pretty clear.
the jurisprudence of whom? In my own jurisprudence paywalls are viruses.
The US of course. Look at the list of sites the plugin works for: none of them cares if you ignore their paywall. The likelihood that you would subscribe is negligible. It’s American readers they are after. And for them the jurisprudence is clear. No deliberate subversion of access controls allowed.
Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons
#244Paywalls exist as a solution to the problem of "how do journalists and other content producers get paid for their work?" Anti-paywall addons are an attempt to get something that isn't intended to be free for free. Ignoring the legality of this for a moment, let's consider: is this moral?
Is it moral for content producers to sell users web browsing habits to advertisers without their explicit consent?
My position on this very specific question is: "no."
But let's not conflate content producers selling user data with content producers selling access to content.
Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
How significant? Firefox' market share was falling rapidly. (It still is declining, but not as dramatically.)
Their market share is lower because at its peak, Chrome didn't exist. The rise of Chrome is responsible for all of Mozilla's lost share. But major factors causing Chrome to gain share are being the default on the most popular mobile platform (Android) and being heavily promoted on google.com for many years. Making it harder to install addons (and breaking all the old ones) is one of the things contributing to Mozilla…
I used to default to Firefox for work. Then they killed the old addons, which broke a major part of my workflow (FireFTP's "open a file and as you edit it it automatically re-uploads" feature). So there was a lot less keeping me stuck to it. Recently, and this is past Quantum, performance on some things (Google Apps) became abysmal (now, this could well be Google being half-assed or deliberately malicious about testing) but that was enough that I gave up on Firefox for work.
Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I am fine with that tradeoff, because on net society would come out ahead.
So if you are concerned with copyright being removed because you think it will increase the freedom of information, how will that not do just the opposite when companies can take open source code and lock it down? So in this hypothetical future world, not only will their not be a financial motive for people to create works since anything they create can be freely copied, there will also not be an altruistic motive fo…
I did not say it would increase freedom of information. I just do not believe copyright is a good fit for the modern world, because it does not really work when copying is not restricted to industrial operations. Today everyone has a copying machine in their pocket or on their desk, and there is no way that applying an industrial regulation to people sitting in their homes using a commonly available tool is going to work.
Keep in mind that copyrights have only existed for about three hundred years. Prior to that there was no notion that authors had a fundamental right to control the distribution of their work, yet people have been writing books (scrolls etc.) for thousands of years. Copyright was a response to what at the time was a relatively new technology, printing. It was not created for the benefit of authors, it was created for the benefit of publishers, who lobbied for the restoration of a monopoly they enjoyed under an earlier censorship law. It is almost a textbook example of regulatory capture.
Instead of allowing new technologies to flourish and new business models for publishers to develop, we are currently trying to emulate the old rules, stifling new ideas (e.g. peer-to-peer systems) and entrenching old business models. It is hard to imagine the sort of technologies we missed out on for the sake of keeping copyrights relevant, or what sort of business models those technologies might have supported. I see a lose-lose in resisting change just because it is inconvenient for some big incumbent industry.
Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could make moral arguments for and against the companies seeking these protections and even Mozilla itself. Ultimately businesses will always ruthlessly try to make more money, and software will ruthlessly seek a more efficient user experience. Often these objective clash. Spotify is the obvious example that seemed to offer a solution in the music space. But we have yet to discover such a solution in online publi…
Bypassing paywalls is a "more efficient user experience"? Wow... that's a whole new level...
It pretty easily meets the definition of efficiency- it allows users to do more, in less time, and utilizing less resources.
Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons
#248Paywalls exist as a solution to the problem of "how do journalists and other content producers get paid for their work?" Anti-paywall addons are an attempt to get something that isn't intended to be free for free. Ignoring the legality of this for a moment, let's consider: is this moral?
I think that when you send fake data to a server to bypass a paywall (e.g. sending google UA) then you are using the server without the owner's permission, which makes it immoral.
But in general I believe that being a journalist does not mean that others have to pay you. You as a journalist have to figure out a business model that works.
Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Caveat emptor is always better than a petty dictatorship. And that's what Moz is being these days; emulating the Apple App model, the Windows Phone app model, and other obnoxious "you have to ask us permission to do stuff on your device" rules. Id rather take toolbar hell. We'd have more functionality overall.
Of course you would rather take the toolbar hell. Because you're not the one who will be installing random toolbars. This is really no different than saying: "I'd prefer that when a company that has to make a decision that affects millions of users they go with the option that's best for me" What's somehow worse is that you can literally have your cake and eat it too -- just install Dev or Nightly, you're exactly the…
But you can't effectively write useful addons for everyone because you can only hand them to dev/nightly users.
Mozilla is saying "your contribution is not welcome due to US laws" to people who don't even live in the US.
Re: Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Then these websites should block the ability of search engine crawlers from accessing their paywalled content, which is basically moving the content out of the clear web onto the deep web (which is not the dark web, there's a difference). If they can't accept that compromise and not have these paywalled articles indexed, then the problem is on them.
They can even have a summary or introductory paragraph indexed while designing a paywall that way. What they can't have is search engines able to read the whole article and not everyone else.
I think this is fair, and so do the search engines. Google calls doing otherwise "cloaking" and says they penalize the ranking of sites that do it. Perhaps they're not doing so effectively enough.