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Comment by SomeStupidPoint | Hacker News Reader

> I'm a hardline free speech dude, but I find it difficult to justify "We changed around your copyrighted work to remove stuff we decided we don't like."

How?

How can that possibly be hard to justify for anyone that even believes vaguely in the notion of freedom, much less someone "hardline"?

Do you think I break the law (or ethics) if I take the ads insert out of a newspaper I buy without reading them? How about if I hire a secretary to do so?

> This third party tool is making unauthorized edits to the New York Times' copyrighted material.

At the request of the first party (you) after receipt by the first party. They're not packaging it up and reselling it, they're automating your curation of a work you legally own a copy of for the purposes of your own consumption.

> You do not have a right to anybody else's IP.

Then the NYT should stop giving it away free.

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I get in a lot of arguments with dudes who believe they have a right to stuff other people made without payment or consequence. The last one I remember is a bunch of DJs who didn't want to get permission to use samples.

I find the arguments pretty spurious and it's best not to engage.

It's their website. If you don't like their website, we got a whole other internet to enjoy.

This has nothing to do with believing that we have right to other people's work without payment. The fundamental issue is that these publishers are allowing public access to their work than expecting to have some control over how it is consumed. Hanging your painting in a public park and then demand that people not wear sunglasses when looking at it, or demanding that onlookers look at it sideways would be absurd. Don't hang your paintings in public parks. Hang it in a private gallery, and make no-sunglasses a term for admission.

Publishers would be better served if they restricted their articles, by demanding payment upfront before serving the article, rather than unreasonably and unrealistically demanding that people consume their content in a certain way. Don't blame your users for your failed business model.

As a side note, Copyright is not the place where this issue should be tackled as no copyright is being infringed (Content is not being redistributed).

It is their website but after I download the content to my hard drive it becomes my files and I can do whatever I want with them privately (as long as I do not redistribute it, claim authorship etc). That is how copyright should work, but of course the actual laws might be biased to the interests of some party. There is nothing new if you learn the history of human society, some groups of people always wanted to have more rights than others.

Two points:

Free sampling for the purposes of cultural remixing is explicitly built into (US) copyright (across media) as a mitigation to some of the harmful effects of artificial monopolies on culture. It's a compromise between those who think artificial monopolies are the only way to encourage the creation of culture and those who view such contrived monopolies as a net negative. There's a fundamental difference between copying and stealing. You seem to be intentionally conflating them by using phrases like "stuff other people made". It's not really "stuff" that they're "taking" and the copy is made by the copier, not the original composer. Nothing has been taken besides the right to artificially restrict the behavior of other people for the purpose of rent extraction.

Secondly, they give me a copy free when I request it. It just has ads included. But there's no reason I'm obligated to read the ads. It's exactly the case where they give me a free paper with an ad insert and I have the secretary throw away the ad insert before I read it.

Do you think I'm a monster because I throw out the ads in my weekly periodocal unread?

(For the record, I'm taking about ad blockers, not bypassing paywalls -- I generally just don't go to those sites. Your arguments hold more weight when discussing bypassing paywalls.)

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