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Comment by Chris2048 | Hacker News Reader

Chris2048

There was a time when corps pushed the idea that you'd need permission to link to their content, where does this begin/end? seems to me there should be some control on behalf of the user wrt to how data is displayed: It maybe your content, but it's running on my hardware; you say "3rd party not allowed to run ads, only us" I say "my hardware, you aren't allowed to run ads either".

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...then the publisher says "OK, you can't show my content then"

Then I scrape the page using JS from the browser side and render it dynamically. It’s all client side.

Where would this sit on that line? It’s just an example but for the 1000 ppl trying to create laws there are 10000x trying to bypass them.

I don’t think restrictions are the way forward but as of now I haven’t come up with a viable alternative.

If a brick and mortar store refuses services and kicks you out for disruption... breaking in at night, taking what you want, and leaving money is still illegal.

I love web scraping (it and tampermonkey basically got me into CS) but lets not act as if this behavior has no moral precedent.

More like a brick and mortar starts harassing people on the sidewalk for writing down what is on the posters on the side of their building.

Ah, the old "unauthorized content handling is the same as theft" nonsense, because a more fitting metaphor wouldn't justify police-state copyright enforcement.

Also, what do you mean by "disruption"? Using "their" content in a way they don't like? content manipulation on my machine is my house, not theirs.

Web scraping is completely legal, see the LinkedIn case recently

You really shouldn't expect to be able to put up a public website and then get upset when people start connecting to it using a standard, open protocol to retrieve the information you're deliberately exposing to the world.

At the end of the day you can't legislate everything to the letter if the people just don't want to do it. If people want to steal content the content creators will suffer and we as a society will lose high quality content. I think that some sort of NPR or BBC patron approach is the only way out, i.e. sponsor a high quality production organization as a charity. Communist countries did this too, though it ended up quite biased.

> If people want to steal content the content creators will suffer and we as a society will lose high quality content

This sounds like a PR copypaste. I don't want to "steal" content, I want to restrict the number of ways I can be influenced to view it. And "high quality content" is often not the case here; I have to get through a lot of crap to get to real news in a lot of cases. There is also the problem of who gets to judge quality - often those that tell people what they want to here are judged so - Reality has a subjective bias.

Then you say "OK", then they focus on tricking the general public into allowing it anyway and/or forcing DRM onto new hardware etc.

My sense is if you put it on the public internet, by default you are giving people the ability to link to it. It’s just a matter of how hard or easy you choose to make it.

Copying copyrights is more complex.

Then where do ad-blockers fall? Am I violating copyright/rights-management by altering how content is viewed?

If a content provider can dictate the terms by which their content is consumed, why not dictate linking rights too?

We are getting further from my expertise. My inclination is on the public internet it’s ok to make an ad blocker and ok to make something that thwarts the ad blocker. Different on a private network.

iframe is super reasonable line to make. "You cant show my content in iframe" is alright rule to make.

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