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Talk:Bypass Paywalls Clean

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Hi Fram, in Special:Diff/1246025311, you deleted the repo and website parameters from the article's software infobox with the edit summary "Adding clones and Russian websites where this can be found comes across as wanting to circumvent the DMCA, not as an effort to create a better encyclopedia". Your edit summary compels me to respond to your claims.

The DMCA takedown process has been used to take down perfectly legal content, and my understanding is that paywall-bypassing tools (such as Bypass Paywalls Clean) have never been deemed illegal in a court of law. When articles about projects that are unambiguously illegal in certain jurisdictions (such as Sci-Hub and 1337x) contain links to their websites, it would be encyclopedic for the article on Bypass Paywalls Clean (an extension that has not been determined to be illegal) to also include these links. — Newslinger talk 06:04, 17 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If a store offers "one free X per customer" and you are going again and again with disguises or under false names, then you are stealing. Suggesting to people that "hey, here is a way you can steal stuff" or linking to such sites is comparable to linking to copyright violations. That something is notable means it warrants an article: it doesn't mean we should link to it as well. Fram (talk) 07:49, 17 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Your argument represents one side of the debate on whether online piracy is theft, which is thoroughly explained in "Is downloading really stealing? The ethics of digital piracy" from The Conversation (RSP entry). The article explains the view of the "fundamentalist protectors" camp that "thinks that illegal downloading is equivalent to common theft", with slogans such as "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" from the "Piracy. It's a crime." video (which is embedded in the article). Conversely, the article also describes the opposite view held by the "fundamentalist libertarians" camp, which considers intellectual property infringement a victimless crime. The article criticizes both views and states that online piracy is not equivalent to theft: "Common theft is zero-sum: when I steal your handbag, my gain really is your loss. The same is not true when I download a digital file of your copyrighted property. In downloading your film, I have not excluded you from its use, or your ability to benefit from it."
My view sidesteps this entire piracy–theft debate, as I do not see bypassing paywalls as piracy. No website has a legal entitlement to keep web cookies on an Internet user's web browser. Even when a news website depends solely on cookies to track the number of times a user views their articles, no user is obligated to keep those cookies in their browser to aid the website in limiting the user from accessing these articles. I'm not aware of any law that requires users to strictly adhere to the wishes of the website owner to the point of self-enforcement; such an interpretation would preclude users from using private browsing mode while visiting paywalled news websites, or clearing their cookies for any other reason if they intend to visit paywalled news websites in the future – which is a situation I consider unreasonable.
The ethics of bypassing paywalls is much closer to the ethics of ad blocking. While ad blocking does limit the ability of websites to generate ad revenue and is a practice many website owners find undesirable, it is also a mainstream practice; one study states that 52% of people in the US now use ad blockers. As ad blocking is not illegal, it is up to each individual Internet user to determine whether ad blocking aligns with their own ethics. It is against the spirit of the WP:NOTCENSORED policy to remove links to ad blockers – or tools for bypassing paywalls – from Wikipedia articles because a fraction of Internet users find these practices unethical. — Newslinger talk 06:28, 18 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
NOTCENSORED hardly apply to including links to download software, it is about excluding actual content which may explain a subject better or paint a full picture of the subject. I don't object to an article about this software, but something like NOTCENSORED will also not help you to include non-free images in articles unless they meet the strict NFCC criteria, no matter your personal opinion about such rules. And no, reading paywalled articles without paying for them is not a victimless crime, it deprives media from their income, and has forced many of them to shut down or to reduce the number of journalists, leading to less reliable media in general. In the end, not only the media but all of us are victims of such actions. Fram (talk) 07:50, 18 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You say: "And no, reading paywalled articles without paying for them is not a victimless crime, it deprives media from their income, and has forced many of them to shut down or to reduce the number of journalists, leading to less reliable media in general. In the end, not only the media but all of us are victims of such actions."
I contradict the sense of your objection: reading paywalled articles without paying for them certainly is victimless, because whether I had read it or not, would have made no difference to anyone's pocket. If it was of no value to me, I would not have read it anyway. If I had gone down to the library in the next building and read it I would not have paid for it anyway. If I had in either case cited it, that would have increased their potential readership apart from myself, not reduced it. That would be quite different from if I had plagiarised the work.
The other reason that it is not a victimless crime, is that it is not a crime at all: reading the material and citing it is not the same as publishing, or even leaking, or misrepresenting authorship of confidential information. From the point of view of WP it is the same as any other citation, and benefits all parties.
You claim: "... it deprives media from their income, and has forced many of them to shut down or to reduce the number of journalists...", but you cannot support your claim that fair practice along those lines reduces their income at all, let alone that it has contributed to media shutting down or reducing staff. If I had included such an assertion in any of my edits, I'd be buried in "citatation wanted" rebukes.
Suppose we had been discussing a similar question when I started out in practice, and online publishing were not yet a twinkle in anyone's eye: to forbid me to cite anything from a publication that I had not personally purchased would rightly be seen as absurd. If however I had xeroxed a publication and marketed it in competition with the publisher, 'that would be frowned on and would be neither victimless, nor ethical in normal research or publication practice.
But it is not the topic at issue here. JonRichfield (talk) 09:33, 18 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The topic is not citing any publication. "reading paywalled articles without paying for them certainly is victimless, because whether I had read it or not, would have made no difference to anyone's pocket." Er, yes it would, if you had read it and paid for it, it would have made a difference. The distinction is between "reading after paying" and "reading without paying", not between "reading" and "not reading". Fram (talk) 09:40, 18 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Reading before, during, after, or instead of paying, is not the issue in this connection. Nor is quoting material on the basis of "fair use", as in citation or review, as opposed to plagiarism or copying and claiming authorship etc. Nor is there an ethical difference between paywalling or open publication unless the reader had ceded in advance, the commitment not to read without payment. And even then there would be no difference between my culpability in illegally publishing paywalled or unpaywalled material without permission. That, for example, would have force if I were to violate a committed confidence, and revealed private secrets or proprietory information. In reading paywalled published material, it is not as though I had snatched a book or journal off the shelf or out of someone's mailbox. Think: you say:
"...yes it would, if you had read it and paid for it, it would have made a difference". That is, to put it politely, a curious connection to make: if I had not read it and had paid for it, it would have made just as great a difference, but you surely are not rebuking me for that omission are you? And yet, in terms of your observation, you should, shouldn't you? Because not paying for something I had not read, would show the same effect in the publisher's bookkeeping, as not paying for something I had read.
And paying for something I had not read, would show the same effect in the publisher's bookkeeping, as paying for something I had read. However gratified the publisher might have been by my act of gratuitously paying without reading, it would not have gratified the author, the creator, who had laboured to have the work published, cited, and credited without payment. The one who really had been bilked, would have been the author, who had hoped that someone would read it.
Nothing in your objection addresses the point that there is no functional, economic, nor moral difference between reading, reviewing, or citing without payment, a paywalled article online, or in a library or a browsed or borrowed copy. Whether it is paywalled or not makes no moral difference.
Many costly books nowadays are sold in sealed packets, and if I were to slit the package to browse it without paying, I might well be charged with bad-faith damage to property, but to bypass a paywall damages nothing, any more than opening an unsealed book on the shelf to decide whether its value to me exceeds its burden on my budget.
As I think I have pointed out, the very concept of who is being victimised is a vexed question: the publisher who has charged the author for publication, or the author who is not paid for the authorship, no matter how many copies are sold.
As yet another example: you and I read the same paywalled article. You had payed. I had happened to pass your screen and seen the same text. My buddy Bill had read the same article on a screen of someone who had violated the paywall. We all three competently and acceptably contribute citations and content to WP from the same publication. Now consider the various attributions of blame by various parties to the respective participants in the reading and citation.
Feel welcome to elaborate on the hypothetical scenarios. JonRichfield (talk) 09:12, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I invoked WP:NOTCENSORED because you alleged that using Bypass Paywalls Clean (BPC) is morally objectionable; whether the use of BPC aligns with an editor's ethics is not relevant to whether the article should link to the software. In article space, the applicable guideline is WP:ELYES, which states: "Wikipedia articles about any organization, person, website, or other entity should link to the subject's official site, if any. See § Official links." None of the links being discussed here are to copyright violations; this is the same reason articles about projects (including Sci-Hub and Anna's Archive) that are—unlike BPC—actually illegal in certain jurisdictions for hosting copyright violations remain compliant with Wikipedia policy while containing links to non-infringing pages of the respective projects' websites.
Although I understand the desire to support the news publishing industry, such a desire is not a policy-compliant reason for deleting links in article space to projects that are alleged to harm the news publishing industry's financial prospects. This rationale runs afoul of the WP:NOTADVOCACY policy. — Newslinger talk 02:38, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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