This is how I feel about all the bold circumvention of paywalls. It’s a legally fuzzy area in some cases, but to me at least, it is basically people saying, “here, let me help you steal!”
That’s rich coming from someone defending a site that existed for a decade purely on helping people to steal copyrighted content until they had a monopoly and were able to force copyright holders to license it to them.
> This is how I feel about all the bold circumvention of paywalls. It’s a legally fuzzy area in some cases, but to me at least, it is basically people saying, “here, let me help you steal!”
The problem exists because these companies want to have their cake and eat it. They want people to pay for content yet they want it to be freely available to content spiders and for it to be spread on linking sites such as this one. It's like the old wallet joke: Get someone to crouch down to pick it up and then you yank it away.
If I see a link here from e.g. the washington post, I might read it, but I will never sign up for a monthly subscription. I don't even live in America so most of their content won't interest me. So a paywall in that case is only annoying. Bypassing it will not cost them a subscription which I'd never get anyway.
When you consume ads, tracking supported content, and money-sorted content targeting, you are voting that it is okay to give anyone the ability to modify your behavior, and of others in your network and household.
People are told their only options are to consent to corporate behavior modification or be effectively ejected from modern society.
That is a bullshit choice and everyone should feel no guilt for opting to consume content anonymously. In fact many -need- to do this to protect themselves from politicians who are unfriendly to basic human rights.
They won't because they can still serve you ads regardless of you being logged in or not. Why force you to log in and give up the instant ad impression?
They can't, because one of several YouTube competitors (Dailymotion, Vimeo, DTube, Twitch, etc...) would replace them and not force logins.
YouTube is about the content creators, and people and advertisers will go, where they are at. So if there is a mass exodus of content creators and users, YouTube is pretty much finished.
