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0 pointssbarre7mo ago0 comments

All of these scenarios assume you have an unconditional right to access the content on a website in whatever way you want.

Do you think you do?

Or is there a balance between the owner's rights, who bears the content production and hosting/serving costs, and the rights of the end user who wishes to benefit from that content?

If you say that you have the right, and that right should be legally protected, to do whatever you want on your computer, should the content owner not also have a legally protected right to control how, and by who, and in what manner, their content gets accessed?

That's how it currently works in the physical world. It doesn't work like that in the digital world due to technical limitations (which is a different topic, and for the record I am fine with those technical limitations as they protect other more important rights).

And since the content owner is, by definition, the owner of the content in question, it feels like their rights take precedence. If you don't agree with their offering (i.e. their terms of service), then as an end user you don't engage, and you don't access the content.

It really can be that simple. It's only "difficult to solve" if you don't believe a content owner's rights are as valid as your own.

0 comments

hansvm7mo ago

It doesn't work like that in the physical world though. Once you've bought a book the author can't stipulate that you're only allowed to read it with a video ad in the sidebar, by drinking a can of coke before each chapter, or by giving them permission to sniff through your family's medical history. They can't keep you from loaning it out for other people to read, even thousands of other people. They can't stop you from reading it in a certain room or with your favorite music playing. You can even have an LLM transcribe or summarize it for you for personal use (not everyone has those automatic page flipping machines, but hypothetically).

The reason people are up in arms is because rights they previously enjoyed are being stripped away by the current platforms. The content owner's rights aren't as valid as my own in the current world; they trump mine 10 to 1. If I "buy" a song and the content owner decides that my country is politically unfriendly, they just delete it and don't refund me. If I request to view their content and they start by wasting my bandwidth sending me an ad I haven't consented to, how can I even "not engage"? The damage is done, and there's no recourse.

cutemonster7mo ago

If there's an article you want to read, and the ToS says that in between reading each paragraph, you must switch to their YouTube channel and look at their ads about cat food for 5 minutes, are your going to do that?

JimDabell7mo ago

Hacker News has collectively answered this question by consistently voting up the archive.is links in the comments of every paywalled article posted here.

giantrobot7mo ago

New sites have collectively decided to require people use those services because they can't fathom not enshittifying everything until it's an unusable transaction hellscape.

I never really minded magazine ads or even television ads. They might have tried to make me associate boobs with a brand of soda but they didn't data mine my life and track me everywhere. I'd much rather have old fashioned manipulation than pervasive and dangerous surveillance capitalism.

gruez7mo ago

>Or is there a balance between the owner's rights, who bears the content production and hosting/serving costs, and the rights of the end user who wishes to benefit from that content?

If you believe in this principle, fair enough, but are you going to apply this consistently? If it's fair game for a blog to restrict access to AI agents, what does that mean for other user agents that companies disagree with, like browsers with adblock? Does it just boil down to "it's okay if a person does it but not okay if a big evil corporation does it?"

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