

"Tunneling Under" the New York Times' Paywall - zacharycohn
http://www.zaccohn.com/2011/03/tunnel-under-the-nytimes-wall/

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nudge
I don't understand this at all. What is it you want from the New York Times,
exactly? A more restrictive paywall so that you _can't_ view things you find
on twitter? Or just no paywall at all, and a pony?

~~~
simias
The way I see it, the point is that the NYT convoluted and overpriced paywall
is no better than any other "DRM" on copy-protection: crackers will always
find a way through.

If you look at the movie and music industries, antipiracy measures have
constantly failed to stop people from "stealing" their products. They want the
people to go back to "the way it was before" when you bought your newspaper
every morning and rented videotapes. All it did is give more troubles to
legitimate buyers and give more incentive to go bittorent.

Netflix, Spotify and others try to move forward and find new ways to monetize
the media, by actually adding value over the "old way" and by making illegal
download actually _less_ convenient than their legit services. I believe the
NYT and all the other news conglomerates need to find their Netflix, not try
to make things more difficult for users and give us the feeling we're losing
something.

~~~
timr
_"Netflix, Spotify and others try to move forward and find new ways to
monetize the media, by actually adding value over the "old way" and by making
illegal download actually _less_ convenient than their legit services. I
believe the NYT and all the other news conglomerates need to find their
Netflix, not try to make things more difficult for users"_

Riiiight. Because Netflix, Spotify and others will be doing just _dandy_ with
their paywalls when it's as trivially easy to download a pirated, DVD-quality
movie as it is to download some text and images today.

I love the logic, though: it's not that you're annoyed that you have to pay
for something that you think should be free; it's that the DRM isn't _onerous
enough_ that it makes it more convenient for you to pay.

~~~
dialtone
It doesn't seem to me that people enjoy pirating or not paying for goods. The
ITMS volume or seeing how piracy in US has been declining steadily are good
indicators.

People go towards piracy when the system doesn't satisfy their requirements.
Downloading a pirated movie is not as easy as it is to pay Netflix $10/month
to have a vast catalog of instant streaming options. There is no comparative
service that is free (legally or illegally). It's also argubly easier since
you don't have to choose the format of the movie you are downloading or the
encoder or several other options while being unsure wether it will play on
your PS3 or XBox.

If you create an intuitive and reasonable system for consumers to operate it's
very likely that they'll stop looking towards a sub-par alternative like
pirating things.

A couple of examples:

Why should I care, as a consumer, that Hulu hasn't reached a deal to stream
some TvShows to my PS3 but did reach it for the Web site? It doesn't make any
sense to anybody but those who profit from this. How can this be helpful?
People got Hulu Plus with the idea that everything would have been available
on the PS3 and then some more, but this wasn't the case. This is a frustrated
consumer whose demand couldn't be met not because of lack of technical
capability or just impossibility. It's really just because of obscure business
deals that have nothing reasonable attached to them from a consumer point of
view.

The same could be said about music releases that are not international. What
is the point of this? How is it that a UK consumer can listen to a given album
while a US consumer can't (and vice-versa)? Provided both want to pay its full
price.

People go towards piracy as a last resort, not as a first step, it's almost a
precious feedback mechanism that tells the market what people really want.

You can of course dismiss all of this by simply saying that the consumer has
no right to decide whether he agrees or not with the business decision. It's
true, but that's not moving forward the discussion in any useful way.

------
_flag
I don't think anyone posting about how easy it is to circumvent the paywall
understands the point: it's not targeted at you. The NYT knows that if they
create a completely restrictive paywall they will die, so they're trying to
let just enough people in and annoy them just enough to get people to pay for
their service. Whether or not somebody with basic technical knowledge can
bypass it is not the point. After all, they don't even ask you to register an
account and yet they expect to stop you from reading x numbers of articles per
month -- why would anyone expect this to be secure?

------
conductor
just fake the "Referer" HTTP header to <http://www.twitter.com/something>
using one of many extensions available for Firefox... Much more easy than
messing up with yahoo and rss..

~~~
hoprocker
Yup. Doubtful anybody could simply make use of this:
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/>

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bengebre
Boy, there are certainly much easier ways around it than this. The thing is,
I'd really like to not have to use them. I'd love to give the Times $5 a month
for access to something more than 20 articles but less than infinity. Sadly
that's not an option.

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yahelc
It is indeed unusual that this paywall has quarks.

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meatsock
if the nyt is selling ads based on number of twitter click-throughs then this
article won't displease them very much.

