Passwordbox for firefox3/12/2023 ![]() Those supposedly “high-value” articles are much, much less interesting than hundreds of free articles I read legally all over the Net.Īlso, their reporting is dishonest, and it’s a (supposedly) very influential paper, so any harm I may be doing is completely dwarfed by the much bigger harm they are inflicting on society. So I wouldn’t go as far as saying that what I’m doing is morally flawless, but I certainly don’t feel guilty for a second for having a peek behind their paywall once in a while. Actually, I bought an online subscription to it once, and when I chose not to renew, they were so devious in the way they tried to prevent me from leaving and keep drawing on my credit card, that I sweared never to subscribe again. Now it has got so bad that even the price of a single paper copy I consider a waste of money. In fact, I used to buy this newspaper off newstands for many, many years. I don’t use it very often, in fact I read those paywalled articles much less often than I would if I had bought a subscription. I have discovered, purely by chance, a technical way to defeat a newspaper’s paywall. ![]() It’s the same argument as with software or music piracy : I’m not stealing anything because I’m just copying bits, which does not reduce the number of bits possessed by the owner and I wouldn’t have subscribed anyway, even if the paywall (the “lock”) was unbreakable. Now the reason some people would still feel justified defeating a paywall has nothing to do with the door lock metaphor. To think otherwise is to be very ignorant of the law, and deeply morally flawed. I’m appalled someone can even ask the question, if that was the meaning of those comments. I’m not sure what the intention was here, but of course you’re committing a crime if you break into a stranger’s house because the lock offered little resistance.
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