Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons

Post by baroffoos » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 5:32 AM UTC

abc-xyz wrote: post #96

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's sorta like pushing a drowning swimmer down to stop them thrashing around. I mean... it is going to work. Sort of. I also feel sorry for the terrible burden that http requests seem to be for you. Meanwhile, large swaths of the richest nations no longer have local news. I guess it's a wash...

God forbid I care about the privacy of those who're technically incapable of protecting themselves from these evil practices. Edit: as for local publishers, I personally believe they should be government funded and non-profit, but if I had to choose between any publisher (local or otherwise) thriving while violating people's privacy, or not existing at all, then I would surely wish for the latter, and I would hope ev…

Post by Mirioron » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 5:35 AM UTC

naner wrote: post #279

bitpush wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that bait and switch? Their content, their rules. Its like saying some people get Nike shoes for free in exchange for a review. And when I ask for it, or even take it, they have a problem with it. I think with physical goods we have an innate understanding of what constitutes as theft. Just because the distribution cost is zero doesn't make digital costs free-for-all.

It is a strained metaphor. What I was trying to say is that clicking on a search result and getting a paywall instead of the content alluded to on the search page is not expected behavior to the end user.

Post by ubernostrum » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 5:38 AM UTC

totfz wrote: post #17

This would not be a problem if Mozilla had sided with users for once and allowed us to install xpi extensions from outside their app store.

Post by jobigoud » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 5:42 AM UTC

Confusion wrote: post #243

fiatjaf wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by jobigoud » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 5:46 AM UTC

jpfed wrote: post #289

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 eff…