I don't understand this at all. What is it you want from the New York Times, exactly? A more restrictive paywall so that you can't view things you find on twitter? Or just no paywall at all, and a pony?
The way I see it, the point is that the NYT convoluted and overpriced paywall is no better than any other "DRM" on copy-protection: crackers will always find a way through.
If you look at the movie and music industries, antipiracy measures have constantly failed to stop people from "stealing" their products. They want the people to go back to "the way it was before" when you bought your newspaper every morning and rented videotapes. All it did is give more troubles to legitimate buyers and give more incentive to go bittorent.
Netflix, Spotify and others try to move forward and find new ways to monetize the media, by actually adding value over the "old way" and by making illegal download actually _less_ convenient than their legit services. I believe the NYT and all the other news conglomerates need to find their Netflix, not try to make things more difficult for users and give us the feeling we're losing something.
They want you to pay to see their content but they don't want to force you to pay for reasonably small or occasional usage. They have not implemented an onerous system that some simple hacks can't get around and I'm assuming that they know this. It seems like they've carefully weighed the trade-offs between pissing off users and getting people to pay - I'm looking forward to seeing how this works out for them. My guess is that it is, as you imply, doomed to failure, but perhaps will be made up for by selling content via more closed channels (ipad, etc.)
"Netflix, Spotify and others try to move forward and find new ways to monetize the media, by actually adding value over the "old way" and by making illegal download actually _less_ convenient than their legit services. I believe the NYT and all the other news conglomerates need to find their Netflix, not try to make things more difficult for users"
Riiiight. Because Netflix, Spotify and others will be doing just dandy with their paywalls when it's as trivially easy to download a pirated, DVD-quality movie as it is to download some text and images today.
I love the logic, though: it's not that you're annoyed that you have to pay for something that you think should be free; it's that the DRM isn't onerous enough that it makes it more convenient for you to pay.
I think it's more of an ideology. Obviously, the NYT could (and probably will) close down particular workarounds, such as this one, but the bigger picture is that computer-savvy people will always be able to get around the paywall as long as it's targeted at blocking mainstream users.
I assume everyone posting on HN knows how to turn off cookies/spoof a referer, so I doubt Zac wants anything more than to play around with getting through the paywall - like codegolf for hackers.
simias|15 years ago
If you look at the movie and music industries, antipiracy measures have constantly failed to stop people from "stealing" their products. They want the people to go back to "the way it was before" when you bought your newspaper every morning and rented videotapes. All it did is give more troubles to legitimate buyers and give more incentive to go bittorent.
Netflix, Spotify and others try to move forward and find new ways to monetize the media, by actually adding value over the "old way" and by making illegal download actually _less_ convenient than their legit services. I believe the NYT and all the other news conglomerates need to find their Netflix, not try to make things more difficult for users and give us the feeling we're losing something.
flatline|15 years ago
timr|15 years ago
Riiiight. Because Netflix, Spotify and others will be doing just dandy with their paywalls when it's as trivially easy to download a pirated, DVD-quality movie as it is to download some text and images today.
I love the logic, though: it's not that you're annoyed that you have to pay for something that you think should be free; it's that the DRM isn't onerous enough that it makes it more convenient for you to pay.
unknown|15 years ago
[deleted]
h5n1|15 years ago
ultrasaurus|15 years ago