Seems like Gitlab seems to be even more ridiculous with their responses to large businesses and potentially dubious copyright claims than GitHub is. It's not the only time this month I've seen them take down repositories related to projects that some large company wanted removed despite it not necessarily being illegal in any way.
Yeah this is not a DMCA thing, there is nothing copyrighted in the code.
The core problem is the newspapers wanting their cake and eat it. They want those sweet google hits but they don't want to give their articles to readers without payment. So there's always a way around it if you can manage to fake a google spider.
For me the current model is so broken. I end up on lots of different newspaper sites. But no, I'm not going to sign up for a subscription to the washington post or whatever to view 1 or 2 articles per month. That's just ridiculous, I don't even live in America. I subscribe to the local paper because it has content I read every day.
If I'd subscribe for every article I get referred to by google or here on HN I would spend hundreds in monthly subscriptions :P It's just not a reasonable ask.
The trouble is that the ideal model (newspapers on the whole used to cost, like, 0.25c) is extremely tricky in the online space, because payments are high friction and small payments especially are not really economically viable. I'm not sure what solution could possibly exist that wouldn't involve some hyper-common payment provider building out a service to solve this specific thing, and then getting all the online news sites to agree to use it, and then getting most visitors to accept "I need to spend less than a dollar if I want to read this article" as normal and okay.
It's ... kinda crazy when I type it out.
But that's basically what advertisements do for publishers today, and if we're moving away from that model (and we *really* should), what do we replace it with?
The ideal model IMO would be P2P micropayments (hopefully a web standard implemented as a browser API), where the payment processor middleman is cut out, so small transactions become viable. Patreon allowing you to bundle and only be charged once for your handful of monthly subscriptions was a good half-measure and a great way to reduce the middleman's cut, but since its elimination, we're back to square one. It doesn't seem realistic to entrust an omnipresent payment provider with this, since they'll always collect a fixed amount of overhead per transaction, which will intrinsicially disincentivize smaller individual payments. But maybe I'm being overly paranoid in some aspects and naïve in others.
The primary purpose of the DMCA was (and, I suppose, still is) to criminalize technology that circumvents access control protecting copyrighted works. There's also the part about takedowns, but circumvention was definitely the big issue when it was made into law.
Yeah that's the thing isn't it? When people use a search engine, they want to be able to click through to the result and read it, not have to subscribe to some paid service to do so.
If your business model doesn't let you offer that, then the answer is to accept you're not gonna be able to rank in search engines. That's it. Maybe a search engine for paid content could exist as its own thing, but that would be because people using it would expect they'd have to pay for what they want to read there.
The attempts to get both Google hits and paywall content feel like some author trying to make everyone pay them money to borrow their book from a library; completely counter to the point of the institution to begin with.
Yeah... some services offer a couple of articles per month and that would be nice though... there is again a way to circumvent it. I'd sign up for a free account with like 1-3 articles views per month because literally I don't read more in majority of the sites (apart from links on HN or reddit)... I do pay sub for the sites I visit often (at least 1-3 times a week)...
