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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

#281

Post by eridius »

austincheney wrote: post #217
_em6m wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> The fact that you can break the paywall (easily) doesn't give you the right to do it. I would argue, from both legal and technology perspectives, the ability to easily break a paywall provides you the right to do so.

Why? "The ability to do X gives you the right to do so" is not a moral argument in the slightest. In fact, it is inherently anti-moral, because the entire point of moral codes is "just because you can do X doesn't mean you should do X". I mean, if you can't do something, there's no point in prohibiting it, because it can't be done.

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

#282

Post by throwaway8879 »

eridius wrote: post #281
austincheney wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that you can break the paywall (easily) doesn't give you the right to do it. I would argue, from both legal and technology perspectives, the ability to easily break a paywall provides you the right to do so.

Why? "The ability to do X gives you the right to do so" is not a moral argument in the slightest. In fact, it is inherently anti-moral, because the entire point of moral codes is "just because you can do X doesn't mean you should do X". I mean, if you can't do something, there's no point in prohibiting it, because it can't be done.

Some of us are immoral, or at the very least amoral. Not everything has to be based on morals.

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

#283

Post by eridius »

throwaway8879 wrote: post #282
eridius wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? "The ability to do X gives you the right to do so" is not a moral argument in the slightest. In fact, it is inherently anti-moral, because the entire point of moral codes is "just because you can do X doesn't mean you should do X". I mean, if you can't do something, there's no point in prohibiting it, because it can't be done.

Some of us are immoral, or at the very least amoral. Not everything has to be based on morals.

Talking about "the right to do so" is either a legal or a moral judgement, and the parent said this in the context of both a legal and a non-legal (and therefore moral) perspective.

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

#284

Post by Forge36 »

blakesterz wrote: post #116
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

That's exactly what I thought too, not even " sort-of " it seems "without a doubt" against that policy. It seems really tricky for Google to enforce though. Wouldn't they need to send out bots crawling without the GoogleBot agent? That also seems wrong, somehow.

It does seem wrong. I wonder if they could double crawl and penalize sites that throw up a paywal

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

#285

Post by throwaway8879 »

eridius wrote: post #283
throwaway8879 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us are immoral, or at the very least amoral. Not everything has to be based on morals.

Talking about "the right to do so" is either a legal or a moral judgement, and the parent said this in the context of both a legal and a non-legal (and therefore moral) perspective.

No. One could argue for a right while accepting that there isn't an inherent moral value attached to it.

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

#286

Post by saalweachter »

blakesterz wrote: post #116
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

That's exactly what I thought too, not even " sort-of " it seems "without a doubt" against that policy. It seems really tricky for Google to enforce though. Wouldn't they need to send out bots crawling without the GoogleBot agent? That also seems wrong, somehow.

If I recall correctly, this rule is why googling for an article and then clicking on it from Google frequently works.

The rule is something like "a user clicking from Google can't see something (meaningfully) different than what the Googlebot sees". So you can paywall direct traffic or links from Reddit or internal links, but that first one from Google is supposed to work.

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

#287

Post by harshreality »

lazulicurio wrote: post #270
mindslight wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The protocol is the transaction demarcation point - anything else is sophistry. Let's try out an analogous argument with physical goods: Customer goes to Home Depot, buys a bunch of $5 aviators. Sells them on Amazon for $50. The distributor sues the customer-reseller for violating their contract to not commercially resell, which undermines their expensive offerings. Customer points out they never entered into any suc…

I don't find that analogy analogous. Alice goes to Home Depot. Aviators cost $50, but they're on sale for $5 if your name is Bob. Alice tells the cashier that her name is Bob and shows an (obviously) fake ID. The cashier isn't paid enough to care, so Alice gets the glasses for $5. I agree with you that anything Alice does after this point is her own business. I could accept an argument that Home Depot should've paid…

I don't find your analogy analogous either. Not only did you equate physical property to IP, but even if you accept that equivalence for the purpose of argument, your analogy seems like it would be better if...

Home Depot gives (more like leases, when taking into account that copyright doesn't allow transitive redistribution... no first sale doctrine for intangible/unfixed IP) the aviators to Bob for free, knowing that Bob will take a bunch, set up a table outside that looks like he's giving away free sunglasses, but when you pick up a pair a Home Depot employee comes out, snatches them away from you, and starts pressuring you to get you to buy a pair.

I'd classify that as a persuasion pattern, which is partly why this is so polarizing (bad pun, sorry...). You had the aviators in your hand, or in Google's case, you read a snippet they had indexed. You can practically taste it, metaphorically speaking, and then comes the hard sell. Either you pay them for the thing because you were so close to getting it and aren't going to let a few dollars stop you, or you get angry because you had the thing you thought you were about to get snatched away from you. The seller is counting on that, by grabbing for the product, you're committed to getting it even if you discover it actually costs money.

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

#288

Post by sandov »

burtonator wrote: post #112

This is why app stores are fundamentally a horrible idea for the web and I'm surprised we aren't more enraged by them. They put ALL the control of which apps can be used in the hands of 3-4 companies. Sure, you can go out and write your own app and side load it but you're only going to have 1-3k users. Additionally, what if you live in a country that doesn't have these "laws" ? why can't people run my app if they wan…

I've used this same argument against package managers on Linux many times, but apparently people want to keep doing things the centralized way, because all I get when I do is people telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about, and that package managers and centralized repos are easier to use.

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

#289

Post by jpfed »

monocularvision wrote: post #22

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 need to publish their full article content for search crawlers to read

At first, I thought it might be possible to solve this by getting search engines to standardize on a vector format that they could accept for protected content. So the crawler sees a 300-dimensional vector that effectively gives a semantic summary of the document.

But then I thought content providers could achieve a substantially-similar effect by just serving their documents to search engines in scrambled (e.g. alphabetized) form. They could still provide normal headlines to get them clicks.

BUT THEN I thought it would be a really cool and bizarre problem to circumvent this by attempting to devise a method for finding the most-probable original document given its alphabetized version.

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

#290

Post by __d »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #164
_em6m wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Paywalls aren’t enshrined by any law. You’re misinformed. the web is public, despite SV’s best attempts to subvert and exploit that. If you don’t want someone accessing information don’t publish it as a website that anyone can access.

Does that apply to online banking as well?

If it's legitimate for a bank to hide your data behind a username and password, how is a journalism-provider any different?

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