
Show HN An open source chrome extension to read medium.com paid article for free - vivek_jonam
https://github.com/manojVivek/medium-unlimited
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yodon
Being used by SaaS business owners who would have a fit about evil users if
someone posted an app that allowed people to use their service for free. The
hypocrisy that tech deserves to be paid but writers and musicians and
filmmakers don't is disgraceful. Excuses about publishers being involved or
SaaS having stronger protections against unauthorized use than reading or
watching or listening don't cut it.

You can want an infinite library of content for free, but know that you are
quite literally denying the creators of that library payment each time you
enjoy their work for free. Having the skills to pick a lock doesn't authorize
you to take away your neighbors livelihood.

~~~
abc-xyz
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that people believe "tech deserves
to be paid but writers and musicians and filmmakers don't".. people release
cracked software all the time, I'm sure a lot of HN readers has used a cracked
version of Windows, or Photoshop, paid .apk file, an AAA title, you name it..

There's also plenty of evidence to suggest that these industries more often
than not benefit from the increased publicity the unauthorized content brings.

~~~
yodon
It's far more common to see upvoted hacks for bypassing content access
controls here on HN. Tools for unauthorized access to software are generally
either explicitly described as for research only or flagged to oblivion here.

> There's also plenty of evidence to suggest that these industries more often
> than not benefit from the increased publicity the unauthorized content
> brings

Seriously? Talk to the people whose songs and films and games are being
pirated. The idea that they benefit from it, statistically speaking, is pure
nonsense and the exceptions to that rule are so far from the norm as to be the
most extreme of cherry picking examples.

~~~
abc-xyz
I'm not sure what kind of software cracks you'd expect to see upvoted here?
I've seen articles about torrent sites upvoted very frequently, the same
torrent sites we use to download paid software. I also remember reading an
interesting article about how Adobe benefitted from young people using their
cracked software because it helped establish a market dominance that strongly
encouraged companies to buy Adobe software because that's what people know
(even if they never paid for it).

The reason you often see websites that bypass article paywalls shared here is
because pretty much all these publishers violate people's privacy (something a
lot of HN readers care deeply about), their websites are extremely annoying
with regard to autoplaying videos, asking for silly permissions such as
microphone, redirecting to other articles if you scroll too far, and well,
it's a lot easier to bypass these paywalls since they give free access to
crawlers (a concept a lot of HN readers disagree with). Not to mention that
more than half the content posted on HN benefit from websites like
outline.com.

As for the benefits of piracy, I suggest you simply Google 'benefits of
piracy' and read all the studies yourself. I also suggest you take a moment to
consider that not all content is available in all countries at the same time.
In fact, many countries often have to wait weeks for the content to become
legally available in their country (when I was younger I even had to wait
years for some series). I'd say it's safe to assume that without piracy then
you can expect about half the online discussion to disappear. Not to mention
that a lot of people who pirate content often obtained access to this content
legally as well. For instance, I might download an MP3 of a song I also listen
to with my Spotify subscription, or that I listened to a hundred times on
YouTube.. Or download a movie that I previously watched at the cinema, or
begin to pay for content I previously thought I would never pay for as a
result of the pirated content growing on me. It's also important not to forget
that the quality of the pirated content is often a lot inferior (unless you
wait a long time), meaning those who choose to watch in 420p-like quality
rather than paying for 4k-like quality would be extremely unlikely to pay for
it (assuming it's even an option for them).

~~~
yodon
Coming from 10+ years in the game industry, articles on the benefits of
software piracy are very rarely written by people who make the software that
is being pirated. Those articles are more commonly written by people who like
benefiting from the use of pirated software and want to justify their actions.
I get it, you like getting free software and movies. Don't forget that you are
quite literally taking the fruits of someone else's labors for free, labors
that if you had done yourself as a business you would not feel it would be
cool for others to take from you for free.

~~~
abc-xyz
I have seen my paid Unity plugin pop up on torrent sites like kickasstorrents,
x1337x.ws, etc. It didn't affect my feelings towards piracy at all. Throughout
my life, myself and the people I've been surrounded with, have always been too
young to pay for content in the first place, or mixed piracy with various
forms of contributions (word of mouth, online discussions, previously/later
paid, bundled into subscription services, or consumed in other legal manners..
the work I pirated and never contributed to (other than momentarily increasing
the seed count) is work that I would've never paid for in the first place). I
think people blame piracy because they don't understand the benefits, or
because it's so easy to blame piracy as opposed to admitting shortcomings with
regard to the quality of the work and/or poor marketing.

------
alyakan
I wonder how long will this stay up and running.

