this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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Technology
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It's common courtesy to post the plain text of a paywalled article.
We've started asking users not to do this. No issues with posting an archive link, though.
Why in the world would you ask people to stop cercomventing a pay wall
There's no need to be rude.
I'm not asking people not to circumvent paywalls. In fact, if you reread my comment, I recommended the user leave an archive link, which is a method of bypassing paywalls that doesn't involve posting the full contents of the article to this site.
Probably because it could raise copyright issues for Beehaw since Beehaw would be hosting the article.
At some point we have to ask oursevles what is more important IP law, or dessiminating information.
Lemmy was founded on the idea that different instances can decide questions like this for themselves.
It seems that Beehaw has chosen one direction, but there may be other instances out there that have chosen another direction.
Still, asking oneself is part of that system.
Maybe, but users from other instances would be lowest opinions I would expect the admins to consider. I would expect mods, financial contributers, and users registered to this instance to have a far greater day in how this instance is run.
so there's just no answer as to why we can't paste the text?
There was an answer from a mod, they don't want to infringe on the copyright here.
It's really only a copyright problem if they're making money from it right?
No. It is worse if they try to make money on it, but a profit motive isn't necessary.
Unfortunately there's another problem with archive.is / archive.ph / archive.today . Their owner has some beef with Cloudflare DNS and returns bogus results to them so anyone using 1.1.1.1 as DNS can't visit them.
The Cloudflare side of the story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702 The archive side: https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680
Note that that discussion was from 2019 but the situation was never resolved and the issue persists to this day.
Thank you for pointing this out, I wasn't aware.
Copy pasting entire articles is discouraged. It is preferable to share a link to an archive website such as this: https://archive.is/5UPAI
Also, you can convert it to pig latin and post that verbatim. Eventually we're going to have to interpret copyright term in diverging frames of reference and that's gonna be an interesting lawsuit hearing.
I don't know what you mean. That is just common practice in websites like this because of copyright law. If the law changes, the practice will probably change as well.
Common courtesy is to not even link to paywalled articles... The publisher has already made it clear they are not interested in public awareness of their content.
I hate paywalls as much as the next guy but when I think about it from the publisher's protective I really don't see a way to be sustainable in this environment without a paywall. I'm sure the writers mostly want their articles read but they also want (and deserve) to be paid for their work. How do you do that if, like you imply, the content needs to be completely free for everyone to access? And I'll bet you use adblock too (I sure do) making it even more impossible.
I don't know how this shit works but the way you frame it isn't it.
Take payment for your articles, but don't go after anyone who doesn't pay. Effectively, honor system. Let the piracy market world exist, and have faith that it won't completely override the people who want to pay.
If millions of people read your stuff without any of them converting to payers, fuck 'em. Pearls before swine. They can pay for their content unconsciously, through ads, and enjoy the kind of writing that gets them.
If I wanted to make a living publishing my writing, I think this is the model I'd use. I write enough as a hobby. I'd only want to let that turn into a source of income, if it didn't come with the necessity of meeting with lawyers regularly to go after my readers. "Suggested donation: $1", and I wouldn't quit my day job until those suggested donations were piling up huge.
But that's me. My chosen career isn't writing, and I'm just a hobbyist. Maybe it's more of a life or death feeling to them.
Yet these companies do allow Google et al to index their stuff, otherwise the paywall bypass addons, archive.ph etc wouldn't work. They want their cake and eat it. It's super annoying to find something on Google and then be hit with a paywall. Totally bait and switch.
If there weren't such great paywall-bypassing plugins I'd want a plugin that removes paywall sites from Google results, Lemmy submissions etc.
Also you really can't expect a user to subscribe to a full subscription to read a handful articles a month.
At least offer a once off small payment but almost nobody does that.
Yes though the tracking is the most important reason there. If they just used untargeted ads it wouldn't be such a problem.
We've started asking folks to post archive links if they want to help folks get around a paywall, as there's some question about Beehaw's legal liability if we're posting the full article on the site.
Fucking idiots, trying to act like the chatbot wasn't their responsibility.
Wired doesn't show a paywall for me for some reason, but in any case the the original source is Ars Technica which I don't think shows a paywall to anyone: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/
It's copyright infringement to do so. No need getting the Beehaw admins in trouble; Google paywall bypassing tools and read away.
That's a lot more effort than I'm willing to go to.
It's the price you pay for not paying the price
Yeah I’ve never seen that, usually just an archive link
Not paywalled for me perhaps it wasn't for OP.