Unhelpful Paywalls

It happens quite often—sometimes many times a day—that someone gives me a link to information somewhere that they think I should read. Many of those those links don't actually take me where the person referring me meant for me to go. There's an intermediate stop at a paywall, a chance to subscribe to someone's information source.

Another time I'll talk about what's wrong with news pricing, but for today I hope we can agree that some news subscriptions are too expensive for mere mortals, and even free subscriptions aren't really free—they take time to sign up for, and they promise cascades of unwanted email. So when people reach one of these paywalls, there are various reasons why they often either can't or don't go beyond it. If not out-and-out barriers, paywalls are major impediments to obtaining timely information.

They are also more likely to be actual barriers to someone who is poor than someone who is rich, so they create a stratification of information availability by class in our society, dividing us along familiar lines into “haves” and “have nots,” informationally speaking.

Sometimes the downstream effects of that information imbalance just seem very unjust.

Insisting on a “Paywall Exception”

While I'd like to propose a wholesale rethinking of how we fund our news industry, for now I'll propose something simpler—a “Paywall Exception” for some topics: that are just so important that it isn't in the public interest for them to enjoy intellectual property protection. I just don't want to see paywalls keeping the public from knowing about and sharing important categories of information:

• For impending storms, lives are on the line. Advance notice could make the difference between life and death. If there is information about where those storms are going or how to prepare, that information should be freely available to all. Anyone who wants to profit on such information is guilty of sufficiently immoral behavior that we need a strong legal way to say “don't do that.”

• For pandemics, a lack of information is a danger not just to each citizen's own personal health, but to the health of those impacted by people making poor decisions that might lead to transmission. It is a moral imperative that everyone in society have access to best possible information.

• For existential threats to democracy or humanity, we cannot afford to close our eyes. The stakes are far too high. Democracy is under active assault world-wide, but especially in the United States right now. Climate is similarly urgent, and aggravated by how societally mired we are in deep denial, unwilling to even admit how very serious and rapidly evolving the problem is. Disinformation campaigns are a big part of both situations. Those peddling misleading information are most assuredely going to make their propaganda as freely available as possible. Truth can barely keep up. We don't need further impediments like paywalls on top of that, or else, soon enough, there won't be any of us left to matter.

I get that news outfits need to make money, but when I see critical information about an upcoming storm, or a possible pandemic, or assaults on democracy or climate change, I get more than average frustrated by seeing that such information is stuck behind a paywall.

They should make their money another way.

 

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Author's Notes:

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It's beyond the scope of this essay, and would have complicated things too much to mention it in the main body, but there is also the issue of how to implement this exception. It could be voluntary, but I doubt that would work. Or people using the information could assert fair use, but that's risky given the economic stakes in copyright violations. Three strategies occur to me that perhaps I'll elaborate on elsewhere. (1) We could expressly weaken copyright law in some areas related to news, so that it exempted certain topics, or shortened their duration to a very small amount measured in hours or days, depending on the urgency of the situation; (2) we could clarify or extend the present four criteria for fair use; or (3) we could (probably to the horror of some of my lawyer friends) extend intellectual property law to have the analog of what real estate law calls an easement, a right of non-property holders against property holders to make certain uses. I kind of like this latter mechanism, which leaves copyright per se alone and yet could be better structured and more reliable to use than fair use. (One might even sue for such an easement where it didn't occur naturally.) But that's topic for another day.

The graphic was generated at Abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and variously either Dall-E or Flux.1. There are many reasons I'm not entirely sure I'm happy with so-called “AI”—or Large Language Models (“LLMs”)—but for now I am using graphics generation to experiment with the technology since, like it or not, we don't seem to be able to hold the tech at bay. The prompts used were, respectively:

1. (Flux.1) «Design a 500x500 image of a fancy signpost, with text on a brown background and white gold trim, that bears the words "Entry Restricted" with a horizontal line below that text and above additional text that says "Critical Info Beyond Only For The Rich".»

2. (Dall-E) «Design a color image of photocopier under glass with a sign attached that says "In case of societal threat, break glass." A small hammer is affixed, attached by a chain, to help in the case that the glass needs to be broken.» (But then the hammer was not correctly placed in the picture. It was detached from in the chain and in a strange place, so I had to fix that in Gimp.)

3. (Flux.1) «Draw a 1000x500 image of an elegant sign, with a brown background and white gold borders and lettering, in copperplate font, that has three messages, each on a separate line which are "No Secret Storms", "No Secret Pandemics", and "No Secret Existential Threats", but make these messages share a single use of the word "NO" in the left hand column, tall enough that the rest of the phrases can appear stacked and to the right of the larger word "NO".»