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Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

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Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#181

Post by cercatrova »

J5892 wrote: post #106
unicornporn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this Hacker News?

Judging from the current sentiment around piracy among younger generations, I've concluded that MPAA/RIAA propaganda against piracy has been a rousing success. My philosophy has always been: Pay for things if you are able, it's convenient, and pricing is fair. And if piracy is easier than paying, piracy always wins. It's the reason I buy all my video games now and rarely pirate music anymore, but half of my TV and mo…

Exactly. If the only way I can get 4k movies and shows without a stream degrading and being able to use mpv or other such video players is through piracy, then so be it.

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#182

Post by Barrin92 »

sfe22 wrote: post #150
Barrin92 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but I feel like this stuff is pretty close to theft It is theft, plain and simple. Someone makes something, owns the property, they have the right to determine under what conditions they sell it. I always find it hilarious how people defend piracy with arguments about making products more user friendly/cheaper and so on. If you don't like something, don't buy it. If you're bypassing payment without the owners permis…

What did the publisher lose that he had before?

Revenue for the service obviously. If everyone acted like the people in question and nobody paid for the service it could not sustain itself, so paying customers effectively subsidize free riders.

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#183

Post by Wolfenstein98k »

ckrailo wrote: post #149
Wolfenstein98k wrote: post #126

I know I'll get downvoted for this but I feel like this stuff is pretty close to theft. I can understand justifying ad-blocking, arguing that you don't want to see it. So even though you're depriving them of revenue while consuming the product funded by it, there's at least an argument that you're only controlling what you see. But using tricks to get access to something not available to you without paying? This seem…

My understanding of the tool is that it actually _is_ the equivalent of avoiding looking at something. The browser either has been delivered the content already or has access to the content, but it's wrapped in an advertisement to subscribe instead of an advertisement for some third party. Looks like it uses the same mechanisms that tools like uBlock use. Similarly, I avoid looking at the advertisements bundled in my…

This is what I meant - this is a technical justification that dodges the point.

How the info is rendered isn't really important to my claim - that it is fully intended to be restricted unless you pay, and you wouldn't be able to see it without employing this trick.

The trick is expressly designed to get you around a "paywall".

This is retroactive justification for sneaking past the security guard when he's looking the other way, and helping yourself to the products without paying. It's just fancy theft.

(By contrast, not looking at mail advertising is just averting your gaze, and ad-blocking is reasonably comparable. But using a tool to get past a locked door is not analogous at all.)

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#184

Post by rfd4sgmk8u »

dangus wrote: post #107
Victerius wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Gates?

Not everyone shares that opinion, including myself. This article does a great job of explaining some reasons why: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/bill-gates-foundation-phi... Something not a lot of people think about a lot is that having a billion dollars is so wildly greater in scale than being a simple multi-millionaire. You have to have 999 million dollars before you have your first billion. If I make $100k, an…

And while this is a nice analogy, it doesn't quite work out in the real world. What is important is liquidity of the assets. And things like capital gains taxes if one was to liquidate.

Having most of your wealth in your companies stock is not equivalent to the $10k banana. Its probably more like the $500 banana and a big stack of toilet paper.

Absolute dollar value of wealth is a trick of the misinformed socialists like to play because they want to redistribute. Once things get into the tens of millions of dollars its no longer about absolute value, its cost of capital, leverage, interest rates and liquidity.

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#185

Post by Barrin92 »

rfd4sgmk8u wrote: post #164
Barrin92 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but I feel like this stuff is pretty close to theft It is theft, plain and simple. Someone makes something, owns the property, they have the right to determine under what conditions they sell it. I always find it hilarious how people defend piracy with arguments about making products more user friendly/cheaper and so on. If you don't like something, don't buy it. If you're bypassing payment without the owners permis…

You have been awarded 8 good boy points by the Ministry of Intellectual Property. Please collect your prize at the Ministry of Love. Bypassing a HTML element is not 'stealing', its reformatting remote data. They are sending the article in the reply to the request, and messing with the formatting. If they did not want you to read the full text, they would not allow an unauthenticated users to access the text. I always…

>empowering the powerful and cursing the weak.

Property rights in particular protect small and independent creators who rely on the fact that people pay for their products. Large studious can generally eat the losses of piracy, independent developers cannot.

This is why today they're forced to either two things. Build proprietary products that make theft impossible, or live on donations and capture only a fraction of they value they produce.

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#186

Post by pier25 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #80
pier25 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. Micropayments have not worked because major news outlets won't use them. Technically it's a solved problem. See Coil for example: https://coil.com/

It's not a technical problem but a business and social one. For example, getting your users to give their money to a third party that then might come back to you isn't better than getting paid directly—it's even more friction and you're giving all the power away to a third party. The user experience isn't necessarily better either. I still have to open my wallet and start a recurring billing subscription, but with th…

> I still have to open my wallet and start a recurring billing subscription, but with this weird Coil site instead of just this one service that I want.

Obviously if you just want this one service you can subscribe to it. No need to use something like Coil.

> And then there's a chicken-egg problem

Yeah absolutely. I had a Coil subscription for a couple of months and ended up canceling it because IMGUR was the only site that had an integration with it.

But what I know 100% is I won't pay a subscription to the NYT, The Economist, or any other news outlet to read 1-2 article per week at the most.

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#188

Post by pier25 »

jrockway wrote: post #43
pier25 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a better solution than subscribing to a monolithic news source. Specially when they make it super hard to unsubscribe cough NYT cough .

You can subscribe through your phone, so then Apple is in charge of cancelation. You can link your accounts and still view things on the desktop website. (I think they also have bundles to make it non-monolithic, but that probably doesn't translate to your desktop because... that would be too convenient.)

I don't have an iPhone and 99% of the times I read news on desktop...

Re: Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

#189

Post by cercatrova »

dangus wrote: post #107
Victerius wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Gates?

Not everyone shares that opinion, including myself. This article does a great job of explaining some reasons why: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/bill-gates-foundation-phi... Something not a lot of people think about a lot is that having a billion dollars is so wildly greater in scale than being a simple multi-millionaire. You have to have 999 million dollars before you have your first billion. If I make $100k, an…

> to be a billionaire, you have to hoard wealth away from other people in a dramatic way.

Why would it be so? Wealth is not a zero sum game.

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