leichter 's Techdirt Comments
Latest Comments (87)
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On the post: How Do The NY Times Paywall Results Compare To Its Last Paywall?
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On the post: Court Says Patent Marking Law Is Unconstitutional; Expired Patent Trolls May Be Put Out Of Business
leichter ( profile ), 06 Mar, 2011 @ 04:21amFederal False Claims Act?
The Federal False Claims Act - allowing anyone to file a suit "on behalf of the Federal Government" against a Federal contractor for frauds against the government, and then share in any award - has been on the books since 1863 and has been used and upheld through this day. It was actually broadened in 1986 and 2009. So there's by no means an absolute bar to Congress's ability to allow private citizens to act when the government itself has failed to.
How that will play out in this case - exactly where a court will draw the lines on what Congress can and cannot delegate - I have no clue. But it's certainly not obvious that Congress can't allow anyone to help enforce the Patent Marking restrictions.
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????-- Jerry
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On the post: Should Everyone Who Uses A Phone Or A Computer As Part Of A Crime Get A Longer Sentence?
leichter ( profile ), 23 Feb, 2011 @ 06:06pmWhy let the facts get in the way of a good complaint?
Judges are supposed to follow the law as written - whether they like it or not. (There are out's for them in some cases, but usually not.) The decision they rendered here was based on the language Congress handed them: The court relied on the ?exceedingly broad language? of ? 1030(e)(1) that ??[i]f a device is ?an electronic ? or other high speed data processing device performing logical, arithmetic, or storage functions,? it is a computer.? The court also held that ?there is nothing in the statutory definition that purports to exclude devices because they lack a connection to the Internet.?
Congress also wrote the law that, for the most part, takes away a judge's discretion in deciding on the sentence. One can make some arguments for this (it increases predictability, it helps ensure that rich white kids don't get shorter sentences for the same crime as poor black kids); one can make political arguments for it (people feel judges are too lenient and have chosen, through their elected representatives, to be tougher on criminals); and one can make very good arguments *against* it (basically, little in real life is cut and dried and trying to pin things down too much leads to miscarriages of justice). Nevertheless, this is the law we have on the books today.
I'd be the first to agree that it's absurd to enhance a sentence based on "use of a computer" when that "computer" is a cell phone. Hell, I'd even agree that enhanced sentencing for using a computer on the Internet is a bad idea. But I disagree that this is an indictment of the judges involved. It's an indictment of Congress, which passed bad laws.
The first part of fixing a problem is putting the blame in the right place.
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????-- Jerry
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On the post: Apple Trying To Run All Content Sales Through Its Own Sales System
leichter ( profile ), 02 Feb, 2011 @ 09:00amIs it legitimate for Apple to do something like this? There's plenty of precedent. Apple views their store as ... like a store. Try going into a Walmart, setting up a booth, and selling books or CD's or whatever. You want to sell at Walmart? You use their system: You deliver stuff wholesale, they get it out to consumers. Start an auction on Ebay, then make side deals with people to sell stuff without Ebay getting its cut, and they'll close your account (and perhaps go after you if for what you owed) if they find out. A real estate agent gets paid even if you find a customer yourself. (I bought my first house based on a newspaper ad. The seller was pissed that he had to pay the broker, who had absolutely nothing to do with the sale, his 3% - but the contract with the broker required it and is quite enforceable.) In a way, Apple is being more open here than Walmart would be: It's as if Walmart said "sure, set up your booth - but you also have to let us sell your books/CD's at the same time."
Is it a good idea for Apple to do this? We'll see. Sony and Amazon and Barnes and Noble are certainly pissed about it, but realistically, if you're an Apple customer, this is unlikely to hurt you - and in fact it probably makes it more convenient for you. (The only way you as a consumer get hurt is if Sony and Amazon and B&N decide to drop their apps entirely. That seems unlikely - Apple didn't make this move until it was offering a market so large that they would find it difficult to walk away. But Amazon in particular is no pushover - they'll certainly bargain hard. We have certainly not heard the last word on how this will actually work.)
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????-- Jerry
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On the post: Netflix Shows Which ISPs Actually Perform Well… And Which Don't
leichter ( profile ), 30 Jan, 2011 @ 06:42pmRe: No Way
If you're going to split Verizon, you have to split AT&T along the same lines - classic DSL vs. U-Verse, with the slowest marketed U-Verse speed being twice the highest classic DLS speed.
But if you start down that path, why not start splitting cable providers into areas where they've built out DOCSIS 3.0 and areas where they haven't?
The fact is that no one (other than the carriers themselves) have data this fine-grained - and it's not even clear that they do. Oh, they know the theoretical speeds of their "last-mile" offering; but that's nowhere near the same thing as actual measured data. Fios, for all the theoretical speed of its fiber, could have crippled connections into and out of wherever all that fiber converges. Or there could be other things limiting them, perhaps even stuff they aren't aware of.
The Netflix data is valuable exactly because it's measured, not a guess. Networks are complex combinations of many different components, and you're kidding yourself if you think you can know the performance of any non-trivial network without measurement.
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????-- Jerry
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On the post: How Facebook Dealt With The Tunisian Government Trying To Steal Every User's Passwords
leichter ( profile ), 30 Jan, 2011 @ 04:44amSigh. So many remarks, so little understanding. And in this case, understanding is actually quite important.
The attack on Facebook *was* a man-in-the-middle-attack, not just keystroke logging. Like many sites - including stores and even banks - Facebook encrypted the password (and probably the username) that you sent. You'll see sites that do that show a little "why is this secure?" help box to assure you that, no, the page itself doesn't show a lock indicator (because it isn't https) but your credentials are perfectly safe because they are sent "using 128-bit encryption".
But they are not at all safe because you have no idea who you are actually talking to. It could be Facebook/the store/your bank; or it could be someone who mocked up a page that looks like Facebook's/your store's/your bank's, complete with a nice, encrypted username/password mechanism, sending your username/password right to them. The Tunisian attack was a slight variation in that they modified the real page on the fly to inject this attack, rather than making up a fake site - but the end result was the same.
If you're going to put your stuff in a safe-deposit box handed to you by a bank official - make sure you're really at a bank, and that it's a real bank official handing you the box! Relying on a "secure username/password" field on an unauthenticated page is like accepting an offer of a safety deposit box from some guy on the street outside the bank. Sure, the box is solid steel and the lock is high quality - but who else has the key?
If a site you deal with offers "security" by encrypting just the login information - complain to them. You'll almost certainly be unable to get a message to anyone who actually understands the issue - but if you follow up by closing your accounts, eventually they'll get a clue.
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????-- Jerry
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On the post: Max Mosley Says Newspapers Must Alert Famous People Before Writing Stories About Them
leichter ( profile ), 29 Jan, 2011 @ 06:03amHistorical background
There's a bit longer-term history here. European countries, for a long time, had special laws protecting the aristocracy (and members of government, though there wasn't much of a difference at the time) against criticism. Non-aristocrats were not considered to have reputations of any worth that needed to be recognized by the legal system. Similar laws continue to exist through most of the non-democratic world today, and provide handy ways to harass anyone who criticizes the leadership.
The US rejected special rights for the aristocracy from its founding. As a result - through a long evolutionary process - its notion of a free press included rejection of prior restraint on publishing pretty much anything. The phrase that "the best response to bad speech is more speech" pretty much summarizes the American view.
European law, as it democratized, took the opposite approach: Rather than eliminating the protections, it applied them to all citizens. That's where Europe's stricter approaches to privacy come from.
Of course, these are broad generalizations. The US has libel laws (even if it doesn't have prior restraint) and Europe has press freedoms that, in practice, rarely differ in actual application from American ideas. Individual European countries differ on many of the details. Still, it's good to understand the broad outline in order to make sense of the arguments.
The interesting thing about this particular proposal is that it attempts to set the clock back (by 100 years or more). Special protections for the famous? Are the famous the new aristocracy?
I think it's unlikely this proposal will go very far, but Americans may be surprised by the way the discussion develops. European law isn't nearly as dead set against prior restraint as US law is. It's more likely to look for a balance between individual privacy and press freedom.
I would expect the first line of objection in Europe to be that this is a discriminatory law, providing extra rights to some that are not available to others. If famous people should have the right to see upcoming stories about themselves - so should everyone. But once you cede that principle, it becomes clear that such a law would destroy news reporting. Every story is about *someone* - usually multiple someone's - and it's just impossible to get pre-clearance from everyone involved. Since publication of important information is itself a social good, this would clearly set the balance all wrong.
[Realistically, my guess is that this goes nowhere at all, not even to any kind of public debate. Very few people really care that a grown man managed to embarrass himself. Now, if the story had involved embarrassment of an innocent third party - perhaps a child - it might have garnered some sympathy.]
-- Jerry -
On the post: Shouldn't The Patent Office Be Able To Reject A Bad Patent Application For Real?
leichter ( profile ), 29 Dec, 2010 @ 10:00amThere are all kinds of reasons for patent rejection, but one thing to keep in mind is that a rejection is typically highly focused: The examiner finds *one* complaint, rejects the patent, and goes on to the pile of other work in front of him. For example, the examiner finds *one* piece of what he considers prior art, and that's it.
Now, it may well be that the apparent prior art really isn't - the examiner misunderstood the claims (equivalently - it's a pointless debate - the claims weren't drafted clearly enough) and in fact the patent being submitted really is different. Why shouldn't the applicant be allowed to clear things up and try again? And ... given that the examiner will almost always only report one problem at a time - what's the sense in some arbitrary limit on the number of resubmissions?
Are there abuses of this process? Absolutely. There are patents that are resubmitted over and over after rejections that really leave nothing standing. The patent office tries hard to have the same examiner deal with all the resubmissions, but some applicants seems to drag things out until they somehow get reassigned to a different examiner who may not be as diligent.
*If* you're going to have a patent process at all, the role of the applicant is to convince the examiner that the patent meets all the requirements the system has. That's go to require so to-and-fro. You could take a trial-like approach - everyone in the room in front of a neutral arbiter who decides when enough is enough and the decision is final (subject perhaps to some fixed-length appeals process that in principle only looks at correctness of procedure, not at facts) - but that would be immensely more expensive than what we have today, and - if you look at court delays - would probably take even longer. The current process seems like a better approach - not that some better controls wouldn't help (though that comment seems to apply equally well to pretty much everything having to do with patents).
-- Jerry -
On the post: Colleges Cracking Down On High Schools Using Their Logos
leichter ( profile ), 28 Nov, 2010 @ 07:05amThis made the front page of of Saturday's NY Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/sports/football/27logos.html
And what's behind this sudden discovery? The Times cites the greatly increased visibility of high school logos due to the Internet. But while they mention, and include quotes from people at, various organizations like "Collegiate Licensing Company, which represents about 160 colleges and universities" and "International Licensing Industry Merchandisers? Association" and "Licensing Resource Group" and "Licensing Resource Group", they somehow fail to note how *the very existence of organizations that make their money from creating disputes over the use of logos* just, possibly, might play a role in ... the growing number of such disputes.
Old saying: "When there's one lawyer in town, he starves; when there are two, they both get rich." -
On the post: Rather Than A Record Label, How About A Musical Affinity Group?
leichter ( profile ), 26 Aug, 2010 @ 07:13amEverthing that's old is new again
Back in the 1970's, there were many labels, most of them small, and most of them concentrated on one area of music or another. One I remember in particular was Nonesuch, which had a very strong presence in what was then known as "world music". (Today, the boundaries are so much more fluid that a separate "world music" category makes no sense; but forty years ago, things were quite different.) There were labels focusing on jazz, on mainstream classical, on less mainstream classical, on folk, on blues, on jazz.
It was only later that we would go through the grand consolidation of the industry, as a small number of giant labels swallowed everything. In the 1970's, "indy" labels weren't a category; they were most of the industry.
Consolidation has a long, long history of destroying industries. It's so tempting to the business wonks: Economies of scale, elimination of redundancies, and all that stuff. It often works for a number of years. But it freezes in current business models, can destroy any real brand equity (how many times did recording companies try to start their own on-line distribution stores, only to fail because, among other things, no one buys a BMG recording, they by a recording by artist X, and don't want to have to pick one or another store based on which artist they are buying today?), and eventually leaves openings for another round of differentiated sellers.
-- Jerry -
On the post: Proposed German Law Says Employers Can't Review Applicants On Facebook… But Googling Them Is Fine
leichter ( profile ), 26 Aug, 2010 @ 05:53amSigh. Another example of failing to understand that other cultures may have different views of the world.
I'm far, far from an expert on German views of privacy, but I've read enough about it for the basis of such a law to be clear. The US view is that you either have "a reasonable expectation of privacy" in something, or it's entirely public. The German view is that each human being has an inherent right to control how - and in what contexts - information about them is used. Thus, you can put information about yourself on Facebook for you social contacts, but that doesn't, in the German view, mean that it should be available to potential employers. Employers may use information you've made generally available - but not information about you that *others* have made generally available without your consent.
Really, this shouldn't come as such a shock. Employers in the US are not allowed to use information about race, religion, or ethnic background - even when that information is obvious in an interview from skin color, accent, religious symbols on jewelry, etc. The push in the US is to put *more* restrictions on employer use of data, because of perceptions that, for example, allowing an employer to use a bad credit rating to deny someone a job - which is currently legal and apparently widely done - produces a downward spiral for people who lose a job, can't pay their bills, and then can't get another job because they can't pay their bills.
In certain privacy contexts, we in the US have bought in to the idea - which grew out of court cases, not law or social convention - that "if it's out there, anyone can use it". But deep down, we really don't believe that when it leads to people - not celebrities, not cheating politicians, just ordinary people trying to get by - being hurt.
Germans acknowledge that protection against disclosure can shield the powerful. In fact, historically, the origins of the German approach recognize that, and say: The powerful find ways to protect their privacy - e.g., special laws against slandering noblemen or government officials; we'll level the playing field by providing everyone with the same protections. This is just the flip side of the US approach to the same perceived problem: (Trying to) remove the special protections for the powerful (see, e.g., SLAPP suits and anti-SLAPP laws). Neither approach is a complete success; neither is a complete failure.
-- Jerry -
On the post: Weak Anti-SLAPP Laws Don't Help Anyone
leichter ( profile ), 20 Jul, 2010 @ 03:13amThe history of Federal regulations replacing state regulations is decidedly mixed. In many cases, the Federal regulations are quite weak, having been heavily influenced by the regulated entities. The classic example is in financial regulation, where (for better or worse) the states have been much more aggressive about protecting consumers than the Feds. (Granted, there are good arguments that some of what the state AG's do is grandstanding that does good for their careers, not the citizens of their states.)
Perhaps the most important thing to watch for in any proposed Federal anti-SLAPP proposal is: Will it override state laws? Corporations will argue for the need for "uniform" regulations, which is code for such an override - and a victory is then followed by all kinds of proposals that weaken the law at the Federal level - thus weakening it in those states that provide stronger protections.
On the other hand, a Federal law that provides a floor level of protection, allowing states to go further - that would be a good thing.
-- Jerry -
On the post: AT&T Wants Government Website Blacklists, Hadopi-Style Tribunal
leichter ( profile ), 03 May, 2010 @ 07:52pmMissing the point
I classify AT&T's proposal as the equivalent of creating a blue-ribbon government commission to go off and study a problem. It's a way of "doing something" with little or no risk that anything that might actually offend anyone will actually happen as a result of your actions.
The attempts to get telecoms to enforce these regulations are a way of getting the record and movie companies "out of the line of fire". The bad press that arises when grandmothers get sued would apply to the telecoms - they'd be the ones taking the action. AT&T is simply applying the same self-defense mechanism to push the blame off on someone else - specifically, the Feds. Realistically - AT&T has nothing to gain from enforcement of such provisions: Someone under a 3-strikes ruling won't be paying AT&T for service, and if it scares other people ... the might not buy all the services AT&T wants to sell them either. And they know that the last thing any politician wants is Grandma showing up in the papers complaining about how Federal legislation got her into trouble.
Dumping this on the Feds is a great idea ... because it pretty much kills it.
-- Jerry -
On the post: India Introduces Draft Copyright Amendments; Some Good, Some Bad
leichter ( profile ), 24 Apr, 2010 @ 12:12pmInalienable rights
The notion that there might be some rights an author cannot sell seems odd only in the American context. Rights of this kind have been part of European laws for many years. For example, painters in France have special protections that allow them to prevent buyers of their paintings from destroying them or modifying them. The phrase "inalienable rights" in the US Declaration of Independence is a reference to this very concept: Certain things cannot be "alienated" from - sold by - a person.
Inalienable rights do remove certain "things" from the marketplace, and thus do lower the value of other things in the marketplace. The fact is that we accept this: Even the most extreme believer in unregulated capitalism these days will agree that we cannot sell ourselves into slavery. Or sell our minor children's labor. Go back no so long ago and you can certainly find defenders of slavery or child labor who argued in exactly these terms: Barring these things is an interference with the right to enter freely into contracts.
Similar debates continue on such issues as the right to sell organs for transplant - or, conversely, the right of researchers to use and profit from tissues removed from people during medical procedures. While a large majority in most of the world believe that it should be illegal to sell heroin, there are many people who argue that it should not be as a matter of economic freedom.
The question isn't - for almost anyone - whether there *should* be things we chose to keep out of the marketplace; the question is what *kinds* of things to keep out.
Personally, for copyright, I can see the arguments in both directions. On the one hand, sure, if I were trying to live off of selling my work, I'd like to maximize my current income. On the other, at least historically, most creators have been powerless in negotiations with the buyers who were often either monopolists or close to it. The *intent* of such regulations is to help such creators - as, on the other side, the *intent* of mandatory licenses is to help small users faced with overwhelming powerful distributers. This distorts the market - by intent. If your only measure of goodness is maximization of market efficiency, then such measures never help. If you consider other values - they sometimes do and sometimes don't. (Mandatory licensing of recordings for radio play certainly helped the US radio industry and probably the larger population for many years, but has now evolved into a pernicious force threatening Internet broadcasters.)
There are only easy answers if you let theory trump reality.
-- Jerry -
On the post: If It's Newsworthy, Should A Website Reveal A Previously Pseudononymous Poster?
leichter ( profile ), 31 Mar, 2010 @ 04:29amOthers have hinted at this, but lets make it explicit.
A) A reporter offers a source anonymity. Who the source is turns out to be highly newsworthy; or it turns out the source is more deeply involved, or is more of a party in some reported dispute, than it initially seems.
B) A news website offers a comments section allowing anonymity. A poster turns out to be highly newsworthy; or it turns out the source is more deeply involved, or is more of a party in some reported dispute, than it initially seems.
If you believe the duty to maintain anonymity is different in these two cases, please explain why.
I can see one distinction between these two cases that might be relevant: In case (A), the reporter retains ultimate discretion about what actually gets published, while in (B) it's the commentators own words. If the web site retains the right - as most do - to remove comments that it finds objectionable, for whatever reason, does your analysis change? What if the web site reviews comments *before* publication, again reserving the right to refuse to publish some?
-- Jerry -
On the post: Mardis Gras Indians Claim Copyright Protection Over Outfits
leichter ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2010 @ 09:38pmTo be fair, it is worth understanding a bit more about the situation. These costumes are part of a tradition among fairly poor people, who spend significant time (months) and money (one article mentioned $6000) to create these outfits - new ones each year. What bothers them is not so much that "they want theirs" as that *others* are profiting from their work, and paying them nothing. They don't, and never have, raised objections to tourists taking pictures of them - what bothers them is the commercial offerings. None of this was a big deal in the past because this was a local, community tradition on which no one made much money. But this has changed in recent years.
Given an overall system that rewards *some* participants monetarily but leaves others out, is it really so unreasonable that those who are left out demand "their fair share"?
It's fine to argue - and in fact I'd probably agree - that the system *as a whole* needs reform, that the repeated cycles of "he got his, now I want mine" just makes things worse for us all, individually and collectively. For better or worse, however, we've been moving more and more of what used to be community/non-monetary/non-market segments of our society into the monetary/market segments. It then becomes very difficult to justify telling some group "Oh, you should just go on doing what you do for love, regardless of whether that other guy is making use of it to make money."
-- Jerry -
On the post: Truncated RSS Is A Bad Business Decision
leichter ( profile ), 16 Mar, 2010 @ 03:23amMany sites have been using truncated RSS feeds ... forever. Frankly, I hardly noticed. In fact, *when well done*, I find the practice useful. It lets me quickly skim through a bunch of articles and pick the ones I want to read - a slightly enriched version of a headline list (which I've never found useful - there's just to little information). There are sites - the BBC news site is one example - where I'll skim the headlines first and quickly reject perhaps 20% as completely uninteresting (racing articles, for example); then the quick summary text (the actual RSS feed), typically a sentence or two, where I;ll reject 90% of the rest. I'll only read the full text of the remain
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On the post: Where Are The European Regulators In Charge Of Protecting Freedom Of Expression?
leichter ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2010 @ 07:29pmBeware of casting stones
There are very significant differences in approach between the European and American systems. They have privacy watchdogs but limited free speech watchdogs; we have free speech watchdogs, but very limited privacy watchdogs. We have a very strong 4th Amendment protecting free speech, but no mention of privacy *at all* in our Constitution. Many European individual constitutions - and the EC as a whole - have privacy protections - as well as more limited free speech protections, in their constitutions. So who has "better" protections?
Before insisting that American values are the only ones that make sense, it really helps to understand some of the alternatives. I very, very strongly recommend the following paper: The Two Western Cultures of Privacy:
Dignity Versus Liberty, by James Q. Whitman. http://www.yalelawjournal.org/images/pdfs/246.pdf
I'm not saying it will - or should - change your beliefs about what the best way to approach the tradeoffs are; but at least you won't find the beliefs of others quite so incomprehensible.
-- Jerry -
On the post: Don't Blame Your Community: Ad Blocking Is Not Killing Any Sites
leichter ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2010 @ 07:51amRe: Re: Do people actually read?
I haven't gone through and counted, but it seems to me that a substantial majority of responses at Ars say "OK, I've whitelisted you". Yes, their readership has voted - and it's voted to say "your ads are OK".
The mistake is thinking that running an ad blocker is a vote on any *particular* site. It's usually a vote on the *worst* sites - the ones that feed the pop unders, the pull downs, all the crap that makes some of the web not worth the trouble. However, ad blockers by default are very blunt tools: Out of the box, they block *everything*. They all provide the option to whitelist some sites, but it's an option hardly anyone uses.
As for whether they are "building community" by encouraging responses: There are many business models. Building community in that sense is just one. What *I personally* find useful at Ars - which certainly makes me willing to let their ads through - is the timely, educated analysis their knowledgeable writers provide. I don't have the time - or in many cases ability - to scan through physics papers, biology and genetics papers, geology papers, psychology papers, etc., etc. I'm glad that Ars pays people who do know the fields to read those papers, pick out the most interesting new work, and describe it in ways an intelligent nonspecialist - and who is a specialist in *all* those areas, among others? - can understand. *That's* my "RtB". If others made copies of those articles ... they would have to add something substantial to raise the value enough to make it worth my while.
As for the discussions: Yes, they are interesting sometimes. They add to the value of the site - not a whole load (for me), but they do add. But you know what: The discussions are valuable mainly when they are among those who know the field. Frankly, there are only a few thousand people in the world who really have anything worthwhile to say about the latest results on quark-gluon plasmas. Lord knows, I'm not one of them. You don't want hear from me on the subject, and I don't want to hear the ignorant opinions of others either. It just wastes my time - much more so than the ads.
There are sites - like this one - where we discuss issues of broad public interest, where any informed opinion is potentially valuable. That's not, in general, the case at Ars. Well, let me modify that: They have multiple different forums, and some of them are explicitly about matters such as public policy. There are all kinds of valuable services in the world, presented in all kinds of ways. The idea that there's only one right way to find and keep an audience is ... quaint. Leave it to the RIAA. Even Ars is doing different things at the same time to see what works. You should be applauding them, not complaining that they don't share your particular vision of how to run a Web site.
-- Jerry -
On the post: Don't Blame Your Community: Ad Blocking Is Not Killing Any Sites
leichter ( profile ), 08 Mar, 2010 @ 01:07pmDo people actually read?
I read Ars's message - and many of the responses. And MIke's comments.
Sorry. but you've completely missed the boat. What Ars was saying was pretty straightforward. They have two sources of income: Ads and subscriptions. If you are a subscriber, you don't see any ads. Ars only gets paid for ads that are actually downloaded, which ad blockers stop. So someone who neither subscribes nor allows ads to download doesn't help pay for the site.
It's amazing how many people think their *readership* is so valuable that Ars should be happy just to have them there. Sorry. Ars makes no bones about being a commercial site that pays its writers. Just how is their presence on the site valuable? There are two excuses people give for why their readership is valuable. (1) They send friends, and the friends may view the ads. In other words, "I think the ads are too annoying to be willing to my precious time and attention, but hell, my friends - well, they'll put up with anything." Really? (2) They participate in the forums, which makes Ars more valuable. Nice idea, but Ars has the actual numbers, and well under 10% of the time does a reader actually even look at the forums, much less contribute. There are sites where the value is in the discussions - and in fact some of the discussions on Ars are very interesting - but for this particular site, most of the value is in the work done by the paid staff to find, understand, and explain interesting material. I know I look at at comments on well under 10% of the articles I read - not because there's anything wrong with the comments, but because the article itself has already provided me with the information I think I need.
On top of all that, Ars's ads are actually pretty reasonable - and always have been, in my experience. There are plenty of sites with annoying, intrusive junk - Ars is just plain not one of them.
If you actually read what the Ars editors have written, they've been pretty restrained - much more than I would be, given some of the ranting and raving. When people have said "if there are ads and I can't block them then your site is worthless to me, I'll leave", they've basically said "well, we aren't actually blocking you, but if your *asking* you not to block our ads leaves you so pissed off that you can't stay - sorry you feel that way, good luck, come back if you change your mind".
I'll agree - and the Ars people themselves have already agreed - that their *12 hour experiment* in blocking people who use ad blockers was a bad idea. They've asked for help from their audience on a honor system: "If you're running an ad blocker because of all the crud out there at *other* sites, please white-list us and see if what we're doing is acceptable to you. If not, please subscribe." What's so objectionable about that?
-- Jerry
...and it doesn't even work reliably
For all the effort and money, the Times's paywall doesn't even work right. My wife ran into it last weekend. She'd apparently reached her limit of 20 stories. We're actually long-time paper subscribers, so "just had to log in". Except it wouldn't work. She actually called the Times support line. They had us clear cookies, log out, and log back in again. That worked for one or two stories - at which point it kicked in again.
Fortunately, for Safari uses, there's a *built in workaround*: Just click the "Reader" button.
There are so many levels on which the Times just doesn't get it. They pissed off a very long time subscriber, wasted support costs (non-trivial, if you look at general industry costs) for *two* calls, the second of which was just a complaint that it didn't work - and ended up with another person who now knows how to get around their code when she needs to.
-- Jerry