Pay Or Else, News Site Threatens

WED Fan writes "The North Country Gazette, a news blog, says users who read beyond a single page of an article must pay up or they will be tracked down. They don't have a pay wall. If you go beyond page 1, you owe them. From the article: 'A subscription is required at North Country Gazette. We allow only one free read per visitor. We are currently gathering IPs and computer info on persistent intruders who refuse to buy subscription and are engaging in a theft of services. We have engaged an attorney who will be doing a bulk subpoena demand on each ISP involved, particularly Verizon Droids, Frontier and Road Runner, and will then pursue individual legal actions.'"

Clueless

[shadowbearer]

  Somehow I doubt they have the money to prosecute all the slashdotters who will soon be hitting their pages. Just the slashdot effect alone will likely bankrupt them.

  Id10ts.

SB

So how big a bill will Google's spiders pick up?

[Eightbitgnosis]

Seems like a lot of automated systems are racking up infractions

Whaaaa?

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAHAHA.........Lame...they don't know how to make a website. Come hunt me down!

If you want that 1 free read but must subscribe, put a freaking paywall there.

2. profit!

not a contract.

[Anonymous Coward]

unless you have voluntarily agreed to the terms this is non binding. there is no mutual agreement to any payment and your actions of viewing a random page do not construe such a contract or agreement. furthermore the person agreeing to any contract terms on dhcp cannot be proven to be the same person who clicked in a week later. clueless asshats.

Re:Great idea!

[SimonTheSoundMan]

See music/record industry, early year 2000's.

Re:Clueless

[Fluffeh]

Actually, in my non-lawyer understanding of the law, it seems that they are offering a contract on the page, which is fine, but that doesn't mean that people have to agree to it. Correct me if I am wrong, but don't both parties have to agree to a contract to make it binding? So, if you don't agree to the contract, you can keep browsing as it is online for everyone to access, or does it mean that you aren't allowed to keep viewing the site unless you agree to abide by the terms they place on the website (purely from a law point of view)?

Funniest bit is the PayPal link

[Rogerborg]

I don't mean the top one to buy a subscription, I mean the one lower down, where you can simply "donate". To a company that will then sue you for not donating enough.

There is not enough Epic for this Fail. They've used up the supply of Epic Fail right through to New Years.

arg

[Blymie]

I was forced to post, so I could undo a mistaken moderation. Why does moderation happen instantly? Why can't you undo it, if your mouse slips, except via this method?

Re:Clueless

[Skal Tura]

Yeah, they got consulted by the MAFIAA :D

Re:Clueless

[TheEyes]

They're just taking the new rulings that EULAs are enforceable [wikipedia.org] to their logical conclusion: that the creator of a contract can essentially "force" the other side to sign a contract by doing something other than actually signing a contract. They will proceed to do what the new copyright trolls have been doing for the past few months: sue hundreds of thousands of people in a single court on the other side of the country, and mail extortion letters to all of them.

The step after this is for someone to create a page stating, "By reading this, you agree to pay me $100,000," track the IPs, and cut out the symbolic gesture of even trying to make this seem like something other than a court-supported extortion racket.

Re:Clueless

[palegray.net]

I've defined a contract in my user agent string, which is bound to wind up in their logs. It stipulates that every time I successfully load a page (HTTP 200) from their site, they owe me $100 USD. Should they decide to refuse payment, I have no reservations about issuing subpoenas for testimony from those who have administrative access to the logs and collecting what is rightfully mine. Let's hope for their sake that they're retaining their logs; I'd hate to have to have them brought up on charges of destroying evidence.

Re:Clueless

[Fluffeh]

What do you say we reward someone who doesn't burden actual customers with troublesome and self defeating DRM instead of mocking them?

This wouldn't be a story if the site had a "Hey, we are struggling financially, and would appreciate if you got a subscription if you plan to read a bunch of articles."

But it doesn't. It goes from zero to a hundred in one step. "Read on and we are going to sue you!". That's why this is a story, and that is why they are being mocked.

Re:Car analogy?

[Cylix]

I have a bus that has no fees and the doors are open.

Passengers can get on and off the bus at various points around the city. There is a sign somewhere that probably says you should pay X dollars, but there is no enforcement of the payment policy. Passengers are free to go as they please without any constraint. Now, this bus is not the only service in town and there are quite literally thousands of different mass transit providers in the city. In fact, the streets get jammed up quite a bit because they are much like tubes. (Tubes have a limited number of units which may pass through them.)

Now, this might make sense to pay if all buses were paid ventures, but in this city of mass mass transit the common expectation is there are no fees. The fact is most of the these transit providers want you to get on their bus so they can beam advertising into your eyeballs. Some say those who use special sun glasses to block those specific rays of light are cheating the system, but that is really a question of ethics and not legality.

The fact is that some of us use special sunglasses to keep the harmful rays out of our eyes. The world is not a safe place with kids using laser pointers like madmen. The law enforcement agencies ignore these kids with their obviously dangerous light emitting devices and as such it's a virtual apocalyptic society.

As I was saying, the shades are important and they look cool.

Re:Clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

that's the most fun idea I've seen in years! thanks

Re:Apparently lawyers are dirt-cheap now...

[keith_nt4]

I thought you were joking by implying she would use something like FrontPage. I didn't realize until I actually saw the error that she literally uses FrontPage. Wow. I didn't think that still existed. Now you're comment is funny on an entirely different level.