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.
It doesn't seem to me that people enjoy pirating or not paying for goods. The ITMS volume or seeing how piracy in US has been declining steadily are good indicators.
People go towards piracy when the system doesn't satisfy their requirements. Downloading a pirated movie is not as easy as it is to pay Netflix $10/month to have a vast catalog of instant streaming options. There is no comparative service that is free (legally or illegally). It's also argubly easier since you don't have to choose the format of the movie you are downloading or the encoder or several other options while being unsure wether it will play on your PS3 or XBox.
If you create an intuitive and reasonable system for consumers to operate it's very likely that they'll stop looking towards a sub-par alternative like pirating things.
A couple of examples:
Why should I care, as a consumer, that Hulu hasn't reached a deal to stream some TvShows to my PS3 but did reach it for the Web site? It doesn't make any sense to anybody but those who profit from this. How can this be helpful? People got Hulu Plus with the idea that everything would have been available on the PS3 and then some more, but this wasn't the case. This is a frustrated consumer whose demand couldn't be met not because of lack of technical capability or just impossibility. It's really just because of obscure business deals that have nothing reasonable attached to them from a consumer point of view.
The same could be said about music releases that are not international. What is the point of this? How is it that a UK consumer can listen to a given album while a US consumer can't (and vice-versa)? Provided both want to pay its full price.
People go towards piracy as a last resort, not as a first step, it's almost a precious feedback mechanism that tells the market what people really want.
You can of course dismiss all of this by simply saying that the consumer has no right to decide whether he agrees or not with the business decision. It's true, but that's not moving forward the discussion in any useful way.
Well, in fairness I live in Europe so I've never used Netflix, however I've heard a lot of good things about this service, not the least on HN.
My point was that if you have a free (albeit illegal) concurrence, if you want to keep your market share you have to give some added value. For services like Spotify, the added value is that you have access to a big catalog of tracks that you can listen to instantly without having to double check for quality and authenticity. You can listen and share those tracks across computers and devices transparently. It's more convenient than bittorent and it's legal.
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.
I don't think anyone posting about how easy it is to circumvent the paywall understands the point: it's not targeted at you. The NYT knows that if they create a completely restrictive paywall they will die, so they're trying to let just enough people in and annoy them just enough to get people to pay for their service. Whether or not somebody with basic technical knowledge can bypass it is not the point. After all, they don't even ask you to register an account and yet they expect to stop you from reading x numbers of articles per month -- why would anyone expect this to be secure?
just fake the "Referer" HTTP header to http://www.twitter.com/something using one of many extensions available for Firefox... Much more easy than messing up with yahoo and rss..
Boy, there are certainly much easier ways around it than this. The thing is, I'd really like to not have to use them. I'd love to give the Times $5 a month for access to something more than 20 articles but less than infinity. Sadly that's not an option.
