Sharing swiss newspaper subscriptions

Life Hacking
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Hi Mustachians

The other thread on sharing Netflix inspired to open a new one regarding the title.

EDIT: To shorten the emotional discussion here: my question ultimately is how to consume quality newspapers in a frugal way?

Best,
whatever

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The most frugal way is to create a Tampermonkey script to read all the Tamedia sites incl. Abo+ for free. The paywall always works the same, the whole article is loaded but than an overlay is displayed that wants you to subscribe. Kill the overlay and make the page scroll-able again and you don’t need to pay a single cent :slight_smile:

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Hi @whatever

I would like to ask you to reconsider it.

You seem to appreciate the quality of the NZZ and the Tagesanzeiger. Have you considered that their quality is the result of actually paying journalists and related professionals ?

@Thaek I fear that what you are proposing would qualify as theft in the real world.

In my opinion, achieving FIRE should not be done on the backs of others. I know that some people would share their “paper newspaper” but it can be only done so many times. With online newspapers the sharing of credentials could quickly become unsustainable for the editors and the journalists and result in the death of one more newspaper.

I hope it does not come too harsh. English is not my mother tongue. I would simply like to offer a different angle to this proposal.
Best regards,

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It’s Tamedias fault that they are delivering the full article to your browser and just splash an overlay on it. I don’t think there is anything illegal about this. If this is ethically correct to do is another question.

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Buy a Library pass with onleihe access – between 20 - 80 chf, depends where are you living.
Then you get the nzz daily as a pdf.

Example:
https://dibiost.onleihe.com/

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I suppose that you are of those who just take the newspaper from the boxes (“caissette à journaux”) because there is no lock on it ? By extension, if you live your door opened it is ok to rob you ? Frankly that is sad. I remember a time we did not think like that in Switzerland and we could just trust people not abusing.

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No because this qualifies as stealing.

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Actively bypassing a paywall is probably considered a ciber-crime. You might actually get into bigger problems than for theft at a Kiosk.
Also: encouraging people go break the law (as in telling them to install a script to bypass a paywall) might be seen as „Anstiftung zu einem Verbrechen“.

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No it’s not. We are still in Switzerland here, were even downloading copyrighted music and movies is legal.

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You are confusing two things here. The Swiss copyright law allows you to download copyrighted material for personal use.
However, breaching a paywall as you suggest it, is not protected by copyright law. As Dago already pointed out, it doesn‘t matter how weak a paywall is, bypassing it is technically stealing.

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Same as using an adblocker, isn’t it? I guess this is still a largely unregulated but indeed morally questionable. “Stealing” is too strong of a word. One could just as well be using a text mode console browser and read the article within the html code. Would you consider this bypassing of a paywall, or is it perhaps the paywall which is not compatible with this browsing method?

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Using an AdBlocker is probably yet another case. Blocking Ads is making something invisible. Bypassing a Paywall is making something visible which the right owner wanted to hide from you.
The copyright law is currently being revised. I guess after the revision, some content owners will test the boundaries of the new law.
However, as a true mustachian you really should aks yourself whether you want to obtain things for free, when you definitely know that you are supposed to pay for them. If anybody would argue that way, why should you get paid for fhe job you are doing?
In the end it comes down to free joice: if you value somebodys work, then pay for it. If you don‘t like the work, then don‘t pay, but don‘t consume it either. That‘s how free market works.

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// back to topic:
i’d be interested in a NZZ abo. however i have to check out the library “trick” first :smiley:
since i read NZZ not exactly regularly

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I don’t agree with that. “Intellectual property” is not property and shouldn’t be enforced by state authorities. It’s the content producer obligation to figure out a business model that allows him to make money on distribution of his content. I find it inefficient and immoral that they employ state policing to make their outdated and unworkable business models alive.

PS. Good book on the “free market” view on this topic.

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Thanks for your input. This is a fascinating topic. However, I don’t agree with your opinion. Libertarianism/Anarchy is an intriguing idea. When I was 17, I very much liked the idea of not having a state. However, nowadays, I am convinced, that a democratic & liberal (in the German meaning of the word) state which guarantees fair rules for everyone, is the best form of society. And I am pretty sure that it is also the most efficient for innovation.

As for intellectual property I don’t agree with you either. Patents are a way to guarantee income for innovations during a certain time. It is a way to make sure, that companies are investing in new ideas.
As a software developer I am paid to solve problems. The code I produce in the end is my companies “intellectual property”. However, some few line of code could be the result of many hours of problem-solving. I kind of understand that my company wants to protect the money they have invested in my time. Otherwise somebody could just use the code and make money of it, without ever having to invest in developing it. Which in the end would lead to standstill in investment in innovation. Why should I invest in research if afterwards anybody can just take the results for free?

I completely agree with you that the business models of many media companies are outdated and inefficient. But so what? If it is bad, nobody will pay for it and their business will go out of service. But if you want to consume it, then pay for it.
What was suggested in this thread, though, was that is is ok to take something for free, just because it is protected badly. Even if you know that the producer wanted you to pay for it.
Let me give you an other example. In the Swiss countryside there are many farms with small cupboards where you can buy milk/cheese/saussages/jam or other things. You just take it and leave the money in a box. Would you argue that it is ok to take from those farmers and not pay for, just because it is easy to take it?

And one last ford about “they”. Do you mean the state? “They” or “the state” is no foreign entity. In a democracy, the state is all of us, it is you and me and all the others, who agreed to live by these rules. Even if sometimes I don’t agree with a popular vote, I still accept that the people has voted for a certain law. By living in a democratic society, we all agree on those rules because we know we could change them if we wanted.

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You are confusing state and nation.
All of us = nation.
State = owner of monopoly over the use of violence to coerce citizen to behave in a certain way.

It is usually in the interest of many politicians to make people confuse both.

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I disagree. In a democracy, the state is made by its citizen. I know, many forms of government are not real forms of democracy. But in Switzerland we are quite well
with many ways for improvement, of course.

The concept of a nation is an invention of the 19th century. I can see, that the idea of being part of a group is important to many. But we tend to forget that this is a completely arbitrary definition which was made up by politicians and is misused in many ways today.

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I think you mixed up three concepts in the end:

  • State - territorial monopolist of force
  • Society - group of people living in some territory that interact in peaceful way
  • Nation - current, previous and future generations of given territory bound by shared cultural values and norms

Discussion will be clearer if we won’t mix this up.

Libertarian ideal for me is the direction that I’d like the socities to head towards, but because of number of constraints, pragmatically I’m in favor of efficient, minimalist liberal government (preferably semi-democratic and highly decentralized).

Therefore, I’m against intellectual “property” for ethical and utilitarian reasons. I think most of these mechanisms are costly and limit competiton. They might encourage firms to invest or to specialize in collecting patents and copyrights, instead of actual innovation. I think they lead also to concentration of market in hands of patent owners. I think the costs of perverse incentives are largely underestimated.

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I would have loved to see the meeting of the newsnetz (tagi, bund, bz, landbote etc) cms developers where an totally incompetent idiot said “let’s just do an overlay but load all the text in the background” wtf
They really haven’t changed their printing press era mindsets. An overlay. Come on.

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I’d say they did that for google & co.
Also cost cutting reasons


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