How come this isn't culturally perceived in the same way as not paying for software or movies or music? I've read various reasons why people don't want to pay. That's fine. But then simply don't read it.
But of course that becomes a bit of a blurry moral line. If I start browsing Google News in the hopes of stumbling upon a WSJ article so I can read it for free, is that immoral? What about if I google the headline of an article I'm interested in? Automatically setting my referer to facebook.com whenever I visit wsj.com probably goes too far, but then where do you draw the line?
Anyway, I feel very strongly that either everyone from HN should be able to freely read an article shared here, or no one. If no one can read it, then the link shouldn't be allowed here.
Then we'll have the laments: oh the ads, the humanity; or, why does all journalism suck?
Perhaps it is? I've almost never had anyone remark that I was doing something bad when not paying for a software or movie or music.
a lot of artists would PAY to get millions of downloads/views
it's a "logical fallacy" to assume they wouldn't
...which is exactly what the WSJ has been doing.
SPIEGEL: $ 9.40
FAZ: $ 44.90
WSJ: $ 30.85
Guardian: $ 6.99
KN: $ 19.99
-----------------
Total $112.13
I’m sorry, I’m a student, I don’t even have Netflix because that’s too expensive.
Because the publisher explicitly allows it.
Etc, etc. But again, I know there are holes in my reasoning.
That'd have to be an incredibly large one-time payment. And how would we know how much to pay?
It doesn't seem like an unsolvable problem. The drug companies themselves must have budgets, and the publicly traded ones have a stock price. So someone somewhere must be able to create estimates for this.
By definition sharing means giving it away for free.
It's really simple, if you want to put your content behind a paywall, then put it behind a paywall. Don't leave a backdoor open and then complain when people use that door.
Unfortunately, this kind of micropayment will not work for most people and perhaps more importantly will lead to less revenue for the publisher.
Clary Shirky has written about why micropayments [0] is the wrong model for consuming content more than a decade ago.
We're free to send them any Referer headers we wish... in a request. It's up to them to reply however they wish.
The l.php script basically allows someone to read the magazine without paying for it. The only entity that loses something in that situation is the content provider.
What do they lose?
There is a reason I subscribe to Netflix but not Hulu.
I had only discovered it when I wanted to resubscribe for other reasons; I probably would have done it earlier if I had known the option was available.