Pay Or Else, News Site Threatens 549
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.'"
Re:Clueless (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Clueless (Score:3, Interesting)
What I'd like to know is, what is this "Verizon Droids" ISP that they plan to subpeona? I mean, Slashdot readers tend to keep pretty up-to-date on the ISP world, especially with Verizon, and I wasn't aware they were using their license to the term "Droid" to start another ISP. Is this anything like their FiOS service?
Apparently lawyers are dirt-cheap now... (Score:3, Interesting)
"...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.'"
Yes, because somehow this is so much cheaper than putting up a paywall...
IANAL, but I have a word for what they're doing...it's called extortion. Good luck finding any readers after pulling a stunt like this...
Re:Clueless (Score:5, Interesting)
By that same token, you might consider their site offering you a page of data an implicit agreement to YOUR contract (the one that says you own all data that is given to your browser and expect royalties), no?
Re:Clueless (Score:1, Interesting)
Getting 503 to the site, but
http://www.northcountrygazette.org/index.html
appears to work.
Re:Clueless (Score:2, Interesting)
Ya know .. the NYtimes forced metro north to re-design its recycle bins .. so that people could not pick up a free copy that way ..
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/19/nyregion/new-recycle-bins-stop-a-long-habit.html
Re:Clueless (Score:3, Interesting)
We bitch and whine about DRM because "it'll just be broken". So what does someone do? Just ask you not to steal it if you aren't a customer. So then we laugh at their naivety that someone wouldn't just steal it if it's not locked down with DRM.
Oh silly fickle Slashdot.
What do you say we reward someone who doesn't burden actual customers with troublesome and self defeating DRM instead of mocking them?
Re:Clueless (Score:5, Interesting)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b4) Gecko/20100818 Firefox/4.0b4
to
Mozilla/5.0 (EULA; By allowing me to browse your website you agree to allow me to browse your website for free)
It works just fine.
If they allow you to browse then they are agreeing to your license agreement AS MUCH AS you are agreeing to theirs.
Heck, just for fun, add a charge for your viewing the ads on their webpage and bill them.
Re:Clueless (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow! This might actually work!
Re:Clueless (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure they had a chance to read and agree. I modified my browser to send out a custom HTTP header with every request:
X-Binding-Contract: You hereby agree to transfer copyright ownership of any material returned in response to this HTTP request to the requesting party.
Re:Clueless (Score:1, Interesting)
(like when you buy Windows Seven NT 6.1).
Interesting Windows fact here...the internal version number is 6.1 for compatibility purposes. It seems that there are millions of lazy developers in the world who, when writing their installation script, only check the major rev of the OS to see if it is supported. Mark Russinovich said that the number 1 cause of compatibility issues with new versions of Windows is applications that fail the version check. Since Vista and Windows 7 are virtually identical from a compatibility standpoint, incrementing the major rev to 7 would have caused countless apps to break when in reality the only thing preventing them from working is the version check. So instead they made it 6.1 to prevent those issues.