Hacker News Reader

Comment by msimpson | Hacker News Reader

It's important to note that Admiral is making the claim that this domain is used as part of their platform which protects the integrity of paywalls, which in turn guards copyrighted material of their clients. Therefore, this would be a correct application of the DMCA according to 17 U.S. Code § 1201 - Circumvention of copyright protection systems:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

Subsection A specifically states, "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

So while I do not endorse the mechanism of paywalls: if Admirals narrative and claims hold true, this is in fact a correct application of the DMCA.

View on HN

But the content has already been delivered by the time this "access control" replaces the original page content with itself. There is no middle step/layer actually guarding the content on Admiral's system. Disabling JavaScript would have the same effect. There is no guarantee that clients must process all network requests or execute all script actions specified by a webpage. If you need access control for a website, your job is to implement it on the server, in a way that is not dependent on client actions, like a login system.

Others within this thread are claiming, without evidence, that this is an incorrect application of the DMCA. I'm simply quoting the portion of the law which is in accordance with Admiral's claim. I care nothing about the mechanism they've created or the philosophical implications or discrepancies of protecting content after it was already made available, etc. I'm simply restating their argument here so others may view it in regard to the letter of the law, and stating that on its face it seems to be a valid claim.

Yes. I wasn't disagreeing with you, but with Admiral's argument. Your distinction is helpful for those thinking that the domain name itself is somehow copyrighted, and the target of this DMCA request.

As far as I can tell, Admiral's code detects use of ad blockers, and puts a wall around the content in response. If you're not using an ad blocker, there's no wall, and the content is freely accessible.

So in a roundabout way, they're effectively claiming that the ads themselves are the paywall. It's a clever argument, to be sure, but I'm not sure it's a reasonable one.

There's also a question about if the ads are collecting any tracking info or not. There's a specific exception to the anti-circumvention clause in the DMCA for anything that can be used to collect personally identifiable information. If the ads being shown are of the typical variety then it's perfectly valid to circumvent them per the DMCA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com