This isn't a situation like Aaron Swartz, where the companies in question are restricting access to publicly-funded research. The newspapers are privately-funded entities that conduct their own investigative journalism.
This isn't a situation like Weev, where there was no access control to the data and he was just probing exposed endpoints.
This isn't a "right of first sale" issue. It could be if the publishers were trying to restrict access to page content after you paid for an account, but that's not what's happening here.
I agree with the GP that the issue is the framing. It's the difference between selling a mask, and selling a mask that's advertised to let you rob a bank without being caught.
The problem is that the publishers are still supplying their content for free, while then trying to attach arbitrary post-facto terms. It would be straightforward to just not send the article to someone they don't want to view it, but yet this is not what they have chosen to do.
Note the description from the add-on page "This extension will mangle your browser's requests to maximize the chances of bypassing paywalls". This is where there's a meaningful difference from the Weev situation.
You can also choose to not read the content if you don't feel it's worth the money.
But I wouldn't be "impersonating" the Google bot, I would just be using it's user-agent string. That does not make me the Google bot. If a foolish publisher chooses to interpret my usage of that string as me being Google, that is not my responsibility.
Just like with the Weev situation, this is another case of someone trying to shift blame for their crummy security.
A user-agent string is NOT authentication. It is merely supposed to provide a hint to the webserver.
I once saw a website that didn't have ads and let you view their content for free if the width was less than 700px. I guess they figured they were driving away more mobile users or something that it was worth. So, was I being criminally minded when I resized my browser to view their content instead of jumping through their hoops and giving them my email address? At a certain point, it is not my responsibility to hold their hand and play along with their pretend restrictions.
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 such contract at Home Depot. The distributor claims Home Depot is a mechanical conduit that only facilitates a larger relationship, and the transaction actually took place between the customer and distributor, with the "standard" terms having been available on request.
The fundamental truth is that the interests of any buyer and seller are only aligned at the exact time of sale - afterwards they diverge. What has happened is that pervasive information technology has got sellers attempting to retain some kind of interest in things after they've sold them, with the "transaction" never really ending (an oxymoron). Copyright is one of the hooks by which they're purporting to do this (which actually at the very least it needs to be reformed so a seller of "digital goods" cannot destroy your access to a copy you've paid for)
As I said before, society cannot function this way - non-pure ownership can work for big tickets (eg real estate), but centralization and every item having a history simply doesn't scale. And as I also said, there is a very simple remedy for publishers - stop sending the article to people they do not want to view it!
(Your argument also implies that it is illegal to suggest someone visit a URL with lynx to avoid a javascript popup)
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 the cashier more to help prevent the issue. But I don't think that makes Alice's actions at the point of sale less fraudulent.
> And as I also said, there is a very simple remedy for publishers - stop sending the article to people they do not want to view it!
Which the publishers do. They don't send the article unless they think you're Googlebot.
> Your argument also implies that it is illegal to suggest someone visit a URL with lynx to avoid a javascript popup
My issue is with intentionally changing the user agent header to impersonate a well-known crawler that has been given access to the site under specific terms.
I don't have an issue with using other browsers or javascript blockers or ad blockers. There's a difference between spoofing a client-> server request and blocking a client -> server request.
I've never had trouble viewing an article in incognito mode, or sometimes even hitting stopping a load before javascript runs, so I've been under the impression that it's mainly javascript trickery. My argument here was with that assumption, so perhaps it's moot.
> Alice tells the cashier that her name is Bob and shows an (obviously) fake ID. The cashier isn't paid enough to care
I'd say that the proper example is that the cashier doesn't check ID and isn't even expected to by corporate. Companies aren't even strictly against this type of soft-fraud word-of-mouth trick, as it just further helps their price discrimination and customer mindshare. Whether you get one free birthday desert per year or five, you're still buying meals.
The elephant in the room is that Google could easily setup a system whereby Googlebot got secure access to the articles. I think they haven't done this because of an idea that the same pages should be served to users. So who is defrauding whom?
Philosophically I'd assert that the Internet philosophy is directly opposed to the very concept of fraud - "identity" does not scale, especially across jurisdictions. We've finally got a way to formalize and mechanically execute contracts purely between private parties, so why cling to a heavyweight idea of post-facto enforcement based on nebulous ambient natural-language rules, especially as an overarching foundation? When you put a quarter into a "claw game" and it drops your prize before the chute you don't sue for "fraud" - you just stop putting quarters in.
Typically publishers will use a combination of cookies and javascript to attempt to enforce a soft limit of X articles per month for normal users. Publishers also use UA sniffing to give unrestricted access to Googlebot and other crawlers.
Circumventing the former by blocking cookies or javascript definitely should be legal, because the client should be control of their local computer. Spoofing requests to take advantage of the latter (which is what this specific extension is doing) isn't okay IMO.
> The elephant in the room is that Google could easily setup a system whereby Googlebot got secure access to the articles. I think they haven't done this because of an idea that the same pages should be served to users. So who is defrauding whom?
Something other users have suggested[1] in response to this article. Maybe that will happen in the future, but I think it's a whataboutism with regards to this specific incident.
Google explicitly supports paywalled content[2], so I don't think it's fair to say that publishers are defrauding Google.
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.
Tracking the ownership of the aviators is a non sequitur, as the issue occurs at the point of transaction, not before or after.
> [Bob] set[s] 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
> 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
I don't think that just because a publisher makes content free to one user for one use case it obligates them to make content free to all users for all use cases.
Does a studio including snippets of a movie in a trailer mean that the movie has to be distributed for free?
I would argue Google's actions are more akin to an advertising or PR firm drumming up interest by showing bits of the article to consumers.
If I had to condense my thoughts into a couple of bullet points:
1) There is a colorable difference between ad blockers and what this extension is doing
2) I think it is unfair to characterize disapproval of this specific extension as an attack on ad blockers in general
3) Publishers have the right to give samples of their content to search providers without them being obligated to make the content free for everyone
Instead your position appears analogous to arguing that altering a driver’s license to gain free admission to a cinema by misrepresenting oneself as entitled to senior citizen terms of entry is justifiable despite being prohibited by law in that jurisdiction.
It’s clear from this and other posts that you have articulate, principled view on many issues. So why aren’t you addressing the underlying economic issue? Publishers, like any business, need to earn revenue. If technological barriers to accessing intellectual property — and the legal protection thereof — are not valid (your claim of “frivolous overenforcement”), whose economic rights supersede the content producers? And why?
The owner of the computer they're insisting implements their business logic. It's trivial to simply not send the article to someone they do not want to view it.
If the extension moves on towards sharing an account, P2P distribution, etc, you would have a point. But as it is, it's only action is to interpret the content in a different way than the publisher desires.
Let's say an abutter of a drive-in theater sets up their own seats and starts selling tickets. The intent to "see a movie for cheap" would only become relevant if coupled with some action that is actually illegal.
In any transaction there is a demarcation point where interests meet and then part. Businesses have gotten used to this idea of decommodifying [0] their products rather than competing - spamming restrictive clickwrap "licenses" etc. So much so that we view common sense rights like "first sale doctrine" as a friendly exception rather than the bedrock norm. A website telling you how you must/mustn't display the page you've retrieved is equivalent to a retail store demanding a share of your business's profits if you use their products commercially. We can envision such a scheme being cooked up with "terms of sale" and blah blah, but people would rightfully not stand for it - markets and society simply cannot function with such top-down control.
The only difference here is that civilization needs to re-figure these things out for the digital world, especially as frivolous overenforcement appears to be much easier.
[0] Adding unnecessary complexity/restrictions to make their market less efficient. See also: net neutrality.