Although it's easy to bypass some of these 'paywalls', it would be kind of unfair to these companies. Perhaps we could have some way to address this problem without 'flagging', unless flagging isn't as taboo on HN as it would be on other sites.
So I don't see a problem with such submissions, and there's no need to flag them or even remark about the paywalls. It's just a fact of the present-day web.
[1] http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/text.jsp?file_id=295166 Article 11, http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ShowResults.jsp?lang=en&trea... The signing parties.
The sites that I skip are those that require that I register before even reading an article.
Are you a lawyer who's defended such cases, or a prosecutor who's charged them? Then I might trust you. I would also as credible evidence accept a reputable media report of a person imprisoned for circumventing a cookie-enforced paywall.
It's good practice to clear your cookies and switch browsers occasionally. Do so without fear of imprisonment whenever you wish.
(Also, most people here can afford the relevant site subscriptions, so that's another avenue through which they can access such submissions, when they are the best source for a story.)
There almost never is a minimum scale defined in actual implementations.
There have been several attempts to sue people in my country, usually settled before any final judgment, for being instrumental in copyright infringement, even if that and the actual infringement occured on limited, loss-incuring scale.
I live in the EU, so every web page I visit is required to be logged by ISPs for 6-24 months. Clearing cookies does nothing.
I'm more than willing to bet that your law says too that circumventing technical measures is illegal and when done on purpose a criminal act. Admitting to using the privacy mode of your browser to circumvent the paywall is admitting to a crime in many jurisdictions. Sometimes with optional prison terms, otherwise fines that will eventually turn into prison time if they're not paid on time, so prison is certainly an option for using the privacy mode to access NYT. Not likely to be prosecuted, but a crime nonetheless.
That would be cool! NYT using the ISP logs to control the paywall :)
Maybe an addition to http could enable the sending of relevant log data with each request?
The future is here.. soon
Also, not to sound flip, but another option is paying for the content. If you're regularly reading more than 10 NYTimes articles a month, maybe that's not such a crazy idea.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ghost-incognito/ge...
"Although it's easy to bypass some of these 'paywalls', it would be kind of unfair to these companies."
Though you raise an interesting point about "fairness." These people are trying to make paywalls for content work. It's the business model that everyone is wondering about... It's interesting to watch the news companies' experiments. I wonder what their figures are... Does the nagware-popover technique work or will the average Internet user figure out how to circumvent this technology?