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.

There must be no secret storms, no secret pandemics, and no secret existential threats to democracy or humanity.

They should make their money another way.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

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".»

Packaged Terror

After 9/11 we were in a daze, a fog that wouldn’t lift, as if the dust and debris of the towers had spread nationwide. It wasn’t clear at the time whether this was an isolated attack, or the first of many.

As if in answer came the anthrax mailings, about a week or so later. That compounded the daze. It was a strange time, and we were all uneasy.

The terrorists only did a little of the job, you see. They killed a few thousand, traumatized a couple of cities. But to make it a really national event, a global event, that required the media and the government. Each in their own way opportunists, they were—and continue to be—complicit.

We were asked to be vigilant about suspicious packages. At the time, that seemed prudent, almost welcomed. There is such an urge to do something in response to an awful happening. It’s an emotional need. A hunger that must be fed.

It was against this backdrop that I soon found a box hanging from my mailbox. Not in it. Just hanging from it. In a bag.

Never mind that I was no one anyone had ever heard of, living in a small town in the middle of nowhere anyone cared about. One’s own life always seems so much bigger and more important than most lives probably are. We all need to feel important.

The package said it was from my health insurance carrier, which to some less vigilant soul might have seemed fine, but I wasn’t taking “routine” for an answer. I hadn’t asked them for anything. I had no reason to suppose they would send me anything. And we were admonished to be suspicious, so suspicious we were.

After all, only the post office is allowed to put something in my mailbox. And this package wasn’t in the mailbox, just hung from it in a plastic bag, probably by someone willing to dispense anthrax but fearful of prosecution for improper use of a mailbox. That seemed to make sense. The kind of sense that people who live in fear are likely to make. The kind of sense that felt good to me. Never mind the fact that the package probably wouldn’t have fit in the mailbox in the first place, if this manner of delivery wasn’t an outright confession of guilt, it at least had “suspicious package” written all over it.

So I called the health insurance folks to check. “No,” they said. They had not sent it. In fact, the return address was an office that was not even open any more.

Well, that was disturbing.

I wanted to go to the FBI or something. But we had no such office in our tiny town. I wondered if perhaps they had trucks that went town to town, looking for possible anthrax mailings and carting them back to FBI Central. So I went to the post office and asked them. I don’t think they were prepared. The government was prepared to scare us, but not to address our fears.

“Go to the fire department,” they said. I shrugged and did.

They seemed as confused as the post office. They suggested the police department, and off I went.

The policemen puzzled at the box I was carrying and finally one of them said “Come with me.”

So I followed as we walked outside to where some kids were playing basketball in an open area with lots of cement on the ground. The policeman shooed the kids away, taking control of the space for his own clever plan.

“Stand back,” the policeman said, aiming a gun at the box.

“But...”

I tried to explain that it was anthrax I was worried about, and that a gun seemed the wrong idea.

It was too late. He had shot it.

Fortunately, since we were standing much too close and the kids would have probably never gotten to come back to play, there was no explosion. Nor was there any powder.

We opened the box. It was a catalog.

I called the health insurance company back. “Oh that,” they said with a kind of verbal shrug. “Yeah, maybe they still do catalogs out of that office.”

I worry a lot about terrorism these days, but not always about what the terrorists will do to us. Now I have a new worry: What we’ll do in response to the terror. What we’ll let our government do in our name, just so they can feel good having done something. Seeing that event, and that pointless act, an act so stupid you’d think it was fiction if you hadn’t been there to watch it, it was easier to understand how we started a pointless war.

And I don’t know what’s weirder—that he did that or that I stood by and let him. It was weird what they did, but it was also weird that I just went along with it. Looking back, I guess it was more caught up in that societal daze than I had realized.

But it’s who we are, we human beings, all of us. We’re easily afraid, and then more easily corralled. We need to know our propensities, and to recognize when they’re overtaking us, lest the simple option of exercising sanity elude us at the most critical of times.

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Author’s Notes: If you got value from this post, please Share it.

I never got around to telling this story when it first happened, but in light of recent events in Paris, and my worry about the selfish manipulation of politics that will inevitably follow, I decided perhaps it was finally time. After more than a dozen years, one or two details might be off in small ways, but it’s the moral that matters, that we’re vulnerable in times like this—not just to terrorists, but to our own terrors and to those who would exploit them.

For more on the politics of preying on fear, I heartily recommend Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

The image was added in 2024 using an image generated by abacus.ai using Claud Sonnet 3.5 and Flux 1.1 Pro Ultra, and postprocessing using Gimp. I didn't take any photos at the time, so it's just intended to give you the general feel.