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Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

You are not allowed to circumvent paywalls, just like you are not allowed to circumvent locks, no matter how easy they are to circumvent. As far as I have always understood, you may publish a locksmithing guide, even an “entering your home when locked out” guide, but not a “how to commit burglary” guide.

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It seems that there is a Canadian case that confirms the validity of paywalls as a "technical protection measure". While in the case, the circumvention was social(obtain copy from another subscriber), I doubt circumventing it via user agent spoofing would fare better.

https://tcllp.ca/2016/05/the-copyright-act-and-paywalls/

A paywall is not a lock. It is code that someone else wants to ship to my computer to run. It's up to me to decide what parts of it I run or not.

No, it’s not. The jurisprudence is pretty clear.

the jurisprudence of whom? In my own jurisprudence paywalls are viruses.

The US of course. Look at the list of sites the plugin works for: none of them cares if you ignore their paywall. The likelihood that you would subscribe is negligible. It’s American readers they are after. And for them the jurisprudence is clear. No deliberate subversion of access controls allowed.

If that's the case Mozilla has no business banning the addon for everyone...

Mozilla is subject to US law. Mozilla has no obligation to enable certain addons only for visitors from certain countries.

Folks, you can downvote me, but that doesn’t make what I’m saying false. Look at the law cited in TFA.

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