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Comment by rckt | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how is this illegal. It’s like saying that listening to a song that is played anywhere, but your paid service is illegal.

Anything public and online is accesible. These guys just motivated a bunch of other people to build more tools to fuck with paywalls.

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If you created software and sold a license for it, and I pirated it, would that be acceptable? They create a product, set the price, you choose to pay or not.

It's a bit different in practice with media. You can hear/read/see it anywhere. You can read someone's newspaper in the public transport or listen to a song in a cafeteria or watch something at your friend's house. Yes, somebody paid for it anyway, but there's no way to control the following spread of it.

Sure, if you hear or see something in a public space, but don't you agree that deliberately bypassing their means of protecting their IP is theft?

It's debatable in every aspect. Internet - is partly public, so it's not something they couldn't expect - that somebody will try to read their articles avoiding the paywall. I personally support on a monthly basis the media that I definitely want to exist. The others... well, they also probably have their audience. I don;t know the economy of the whole thing, but probably in the end everyone gets their audience/support group.

> "It's debatable in every aspect" -- A business creates a product. They offer the product to consumers for a price. If you take the product without paying, you are stealing. Seems straightforward to me.

If it’s a tool or something similar, yeah. Information is something you have very limited control over in public space. I guess it’s more a question of the business model rather than considering this stealing or not. The whole art domain is based on stealing and recycling.

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