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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

#361

Post by otterley »

austincheney wrote: post #360
otterley wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attorney here! (Not providing legal counsel, though.) It’s a common misconception that the word “effective,” as used in the respective legislation, was intended to mean “successful” or “always cause.” Rather, it’s always been interpreted to mean, “is designed to have the effect of.” The fact that the measure is not always successful or is breakable does not make the law no longer applicable; that would be an absurd r…

Quick question. If one group intends a grossly inadequate effort to be a layer of security and another party ignores that effort who is in error? It could be argued that if the supposed security measure is so poorly conceived the bypassing party presumed it to be an error and thus used their software knowledge to mitigate the defect. On one hand there is an intentional barrier to restrict access to content while on t…

To make a long story short, the law to date has always been on the side of the property owner/rights holder insofar as these sorts of questions are concerned. You can’t presume that just because the door is swinging open in the breeze that it constitutes an invitation to enter or that you can fix the defect on someone else’s behalf without repercussions. Context matters in the law, just as it does in the real world.

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

#362

Post by Veen »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #335
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.

A little information is a dangerous thing. --- Sufficiently flawed journalism is perhaps one of the most severe problems in our society. People are fed half truths, and at times simply false information, and then go on to repeat it and base their world views upon as if it were fact. And in the era of social media false and sensational views spread incredibly rapidly while any 'corrections' are basically dead on arriv…

We can all agree that rewriting science department press releases is a bad idea and that journalists often get it wrong. But I wasn't referring to shoddy journalism, naked propaganda, click bait, or low-quality churnalism. My point was that no journalist or publication is perfect, but some are good enough, and what they do is expensive, necessary, and deserving of support.

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

#363

Post by sfink »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #269
dao- wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have telemetry data on performance, user retention, installed addons and how these things correlate.

> We have telemetry data on performance, user retention, installed addons and how these things correlate. Then why is that not itself an obvious solution? Use that data to provide a default-on blacklist of known-malicious addons. Then you have a blacklist rather than a whitelist, so it can justifiably be more difficult for the user to override it and the user has no motivation to do so for a malicious addon they didn…

As I recall, because people were already programmatically generating endless numbers of malware extension IDs to avoid blacklisting.

Blacklisting depends on a limited supply of whatever you're trying to control. UUIDs are not limited.

More generally, if you come up with an obviously superior solution to a problem that someone else has claimed is important and difficult, and has spent considerable resources addressing, perhaps it would be more constructive to investigate or ask questions to test your understanding of the situation before assuming and asserting that the other people are doing it all wrong?

I'm not saying mozilla has the best possible solution here. I don't know what that would be. I do know (I work for mozilla though not in this area) that the step was taken to address real, and very active, threats to security, privacy, and stability.

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

#364

Post by __d »

realusername wrote: post #346
__d wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

because there's no username and passwords for paywalls...

The ones I'm thinking of (eg. NYTimes, WaPo, WSJ, etc) are all username/password.

What kind of paywall are you thinking of?

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

#365

Post by __d »

cipherzero wrote: post #293
__d wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Does your bank allow your account to be indexed by google?

No.

So is that's your fundamental issue with a paywall? Anything that's available to Google (and Bing, DDG, etc) should also be available to you at no cost?

Restating that from the other perspective: if the information isn't universally available for no cost, it cannot be looked up via a search engine?

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

#366

Post by cipherzero »

__d wrote: post #365
cipherzero wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your bank allow your account to be indexed by google?

No. So is that's your fundamental issue with a paywall? Anything that's available to Google (and Bing, DDG, etc) should also be available to you at no cost? Restating that from the other perspective: if the information isn't universally available for no cost, it cannot be looked up via a search engine?

Uh yeah. I'm assuming you know how HTTP works, but if not, _basically_ you send a request to GET content, and the server makes a decision on what/whether or not to return. If that user shouldn't be able to see the content because they haven't logged in then its up to the server to decide.

It's crazy to send them the content but tell them not to read it... back to your example would you expect your bank to do that? Here's all the account details and transactions but oops thats not your account. I'm guessing no, you'd hold your bank to a high technical standard.

To be clear, if newspapers/journalists want to work out some special agreement with google (or partner/agreed upon indexers) so their requests are authenticated so that only they have access to the content - i think that is a better solution then pay walls and sending the article and saying "don't read this please"

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

#367

Post by cipherzero »

__d wrote: post #364
realusername wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because there's no username and passwords for paywalls...

The ones I'm thinking of (eg. NYTimes, WaPo, WSJ, etc) are all username/password. What kind of paywall are you thinking of?

How do you think this add on was working? do you think it was brute forcing the password of all the sites you were thinking of?

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

#368

Post by cipherzero »

alpaca128 wrote: post #323
c2h5oh wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both DMCA and EU directive 2001/29/EC prohibit circumventing technological measures that "effectively control access". Checking user agent doesn't meet the requirement to be considered an effective access control technological measure.

> Checking user agent doesn't meet the requirement to be considered an effective access control technological measure. I highly doubt that. Keep in mind that age restrictions which make you hit a single button to circumvent them are much worse in keeping the wrong users out, and afaik legally they're perfectly fine. "Effective access control" means they have to do something which may work to some degree and doesn't h…

Would you be making the same argument if we were talking about your bank's website?

IMO Effective access control works both ways. you can't send the ALL of the content back and then have the access control work on the client machine. What if i just used curl and viewed the HTML raw to read the article?

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

#369

Post by eridius »

austincheney wrote: post #314
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.

This isn't really about morality, because if were there would be a harm. Nobody is being harmed here. This is about technology, specifically content on the web. In technology the ability to do something absolutely is the right to so do unless you have already agreed otherwise. If you really REALLY want to make this about morality then I would argue restricting access to available content is the greater moral offense,…

> In technology the ability to do something absolutely is the right to so do unless you have already agreed otherwise.

That's just plain wrong. There's nothing special about technology that means you get to throw all your existing moral principles out the window. The ability to technically do something does not confer you the right do it, either legally or morally.

Maybe if I draw an analogy to patents it might make sense? It seems most people in technology agree that taking something unpatentable and adding "do it on a computer" shouldn't make it patentable. Morality is no different. Taking something immoral, like taking someone else's intellectual property without paying for it, and saying "but do it on a computer" doesn't suddenly make it moral. Taking someone else's IP isn't immoral because you're depriving them of the paper it's printed on (that part is just petty theft), it's immoral because you're depriving them of the right to control the distribution of their IP and the right to get compensated for the work they did in exchange for giving you the right to use the IP.

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

#370

Post by austincheney »

eridius wrote: post #369
austincheney wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really about morality, because if were there would be a harm. Nobody is being harmed here. This is about technology, specifically content on the web. In technology the ability to do something absolutely is the right to so do unless you have already agreed otherwise. If you really REALLY want to make this about morality then I would argue restricting access to available content is the greater moral offense,…

> In technology the ability to do something absolutely is the right to so do unless you have already agreed otherwise. That's just plain wrong. There's nothing special about technology that means you get to throw all your existing moral principles out the window. The ability to technically do something does not confer you the right do it, either legally or morally. Maybe if I draw an analogy to patents it might make…

Which moral principle is in violation? You are serving content and then complaining about people reading it. If you are so interested in protecting your IP then why are you giving it to me anonymously? In no way have I altered your means of distribution.
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