As part of the August 23 edition of the Risky Biz News newsletter, came this news:

Bypass Paywalls Clean removed: The News Media Alliance has filed a DMCA takedown notice with GitHub and removed the Bypass Paywalls Clean browser extension from the site, including thousands of its forks. As the name suggests, the extension was being used to bypass paywalls on more than 2,200 news sites. [Additional coverage in TorrentFreak]

Some quick babble about the legal aspects of this

Immaterial as it is, intellectual property is, especially in capitalism, property. This means that, for instance, unauthorized access to copyrighted material can be interpreted by law (and it usually is!) as theft.

Now, from a practical standpoint, in the vast majority of cases, people who only access such material are not prosecuted. Half of the planet has pirated something at least once in their lives: software, music, films, books, whatever. The representatives of the rights holders choose instead to prosecute those who facilitate the illegal spreading of such contents, and those who actively spread such files.

Some examples:

  • In practice, just accessing a server that illegally offers files for download and downloading some of them wouldn’t get you prosecuted, unless you’re specifically targeted, monitored, intercepted, and they want to screw you. (Use a VPN!)
  • However, if the server that hosts such files is in a jurisdiction that cooperates with (Western) law enforcing agencies, it would be seized, and, when possible, those who put it in place would face jail time, if apprehended. (Kim Dotcom is to be extradited to the US, after having fight extradition to the US since 2012.)
  • Should you be torrenting, due to the very nature of P2P protocols (including DC, Gnutella, eDonkey aka e2k, eMule using Kad, and the last fad called IPFS), you also distribute what you retrieve, so you’re going to be prosecuted in some Western democracies (sic). (Use a VPN!)

Why I am in favor of some such piracy

There are anarchistic people who say that information should always circulate free of any legal and pecuniary obstacles. Movies and music can’t be classified as information, though. Newspapers? Pretty much so. Fiction books? Well… words are ways of expression, but this is a bit of a stretch. And (commercial) software is definitely not information, especially as the source code is company confidential.

Then there is the following historical aspect worth mentioning.

While today’s Americans are mostly ignoramuses, uneducated, and uncultured by European standards, this wasn’t always the case. (And the quality of education is decreasing everywhere on this planet.)

The first subscription library was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731. The first publicly funded, free public library in the United States was the Peterborough Town Library in New Hampshire, established in 1833. The first large-scale, municipal public library in the U.S. is considered to be the Boston Public Library, established in 1852. The United States was a pioneer in the field of making books accessible to masses through public libraries.

Well, guess what books they were using back then, not counting Mark Twain’s? Pirated British titles!

How come? After the United States gained independence, it did not immediately establish international copyright agreements. As a result, U.S. publishers freely reprinted works by British authors without having to pay royalties. This lack of international copyright protection meant that British books could be printed and sold in the U.S. at much lower prices than they would have been if publishers had to pay for the rights. Consequently, many British literary works, including those by popular authors like Charles Dickens, were widely available and affordable to American readers. This provided the American public with access to a broad range of literature, which was essential for the country’s cultural and intellectual growth. This approach was pragmatic, prioritizing the immediate educational and cultural needs of the American public over international copyright considerations. It wasn’t until the International Copyright Act of 1891 (the “Chace Act”) that the U.S. began to formally recognize foreign copyrights.

But I have my list of arguments for a certain degree of piracy. In no particular order:

  • In the case at hand, which concerns online newspapers and magazines, the fact that their protection mechanisms can be so easily bypassed means they’re stupid and broken. If a reader’s subscription were properly checked server-side, with no actual contents being sent to the browser, this wouldn’t happen. But when some part of the checking relies on browser-side JS, this is what you get. They deserve to be pirated. They should hire better software developers. Their copyrighted content is de facto public once you know how to access it.
  • Some major newspapers, including the French Le Monde and Le Figaro, have the best articles behind a paywall, but not as this should have been. It’s not about those articles that you can read by purchasing the printed newspaper or the PDF. It’s about web-only contents! Among other things, such content is not archived at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), which is against the law (I suppose it’s a loophole). All the nonsensical crap that doesn’t matter even a month later is archived and accessible in the future, but the best articles are only available to those having an online subscription, which in most cases is a forced “print + online” one. Such a shameful practice should be punished. They deserve to be pirated.
  • The French have shady pricing policies for books. The full-sized (grand format) initial release of a novel, although not hardcover, can cost north of €17.90. One or two years later, the paperback (poche) is released at, say, €7.90 or less. Meanwhile, an e-book is released at €12.90 or €13.99, which is outrageous! How can a collection of bytes be more expensive than a paperback edition? Such publishing houses deserve to be pirated!
  • If the information cannot be free, at least there should be uniform rules about copyright. There aren’t. In some countries (say, Canada), the literary works fall into the public domain 50 years after the death of the author; in other countries (it’s the case of the European Union since 1993, and for books published since 1978 in the United States), the term is 70 years post mortem auctoris. And then there are unbelievable exceptions:
    • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry entered the public domain everywhere, except in France! In Belgium, it’s been in the public domain since 2015 (protected for 1944 + 70 years). But in France there’s a special 30-year extension for authors who “died for France” and 8 extra years of “war extensions,” plus that they don’t retroactively apply the 70-year rule that even Belgium applies as is. As the famous European directive extending copyright to 70 years for everyone since 1993 only took effect in France in 1997 (1944 + 50 = 1994, so “normally” the copyright should have expired in 1995, the date from which the extensions are computed), they computed 1944 + 50 + 30 + 8 = 2032. Le Petit Prince sera libre de droits en France en 2033.
    • J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy has an infinite copyright! In 1929, J.M. Barrie donated all his rights to Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) in London, a children’s hospital. Barrie died in 1937, so under normal circumstances, the copyright would have expired in 2007. However, due to the special circumstances of Barrie’s donation, the UK Parliament passed the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which included a special clause that allows Great Ormond Street Hospital to continue receiving royalties from Peter Pan indefinitely. This special provision applies mainly in the UK because this is a UK law.
  • With such idiocy, how not to become an anarchist and say, “Screw this copyright shit”?
  • Finally, to reach the multimedia, there are two aspects that make piracy morally acceptable, while still illegal:
    • The court cases initiated by organizations such as RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) or MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) had the cheek to claim millions and millions in “lost business,” although it’s clear that not even 0.001% of those illegal downloads would have been transformed into lawfully purchases, should piracy have been impossible.
    • Strictly for the music that is legally broadcast by FM/DAB radio stations and through Internet radio streams, there are taxes paid for that, and such taxes go to organizations that are supposed to distribute them to the respective interpreters and composers. Some such national organizations: SACEM (Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Éditeurs de Musique), PRS for Music (Performing Right Society) and PPL (Phonographic Performance Limited), GEMA (Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte), SIAE (Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori). Now, even in the age of cryptomining and of the LLMs, is anyone sane-minded really holding the belief that there is any form of accurate counting of the times each track has been broadcast? Spotify and similar services have an accurate counting of playing times, but not most radio stations. And who’s going to sum up all those times? Most likely, such big organizations share most of the money among the biggest names, and not directly, but through mammoths such as Sony Music and BMG Rights Management GmbH. At their level, I suspect entities like Sony Music to distribute such income based on CD sales rather than on actual broadcast occurrences. Niche performers lose anyway, and millionaires get richer.

OK, I covered too much. This was supposed to be about Bypass Firewalls, and I added too much context. But here, too, the “lost business” is marginal: most of its users would never, but absolutely never, pay for a subscription to any of the newspapers whose paywalls are bypassed this way!

Bypass Firewall in a nutshell

I don’t remember when I first discovered this extension as a way to bypass paywalls for some major international newspapers. But at some point in time, this extension could be found at these addresses:

Obviously, this repository has been taken down. It then moved here:

Yet another takedown, and the developer has been blocked.

It then moved here:

And this was the repo that has now been taken down, too. You cannot download anything.

The author’s Twitter account, Magnolia1234B, needs to be checked for updates. At the time of writing, this is where the extension can be found:

Ironically, the instructions are still hosted by the old repo:

So you need to get bypass_paywalls_clean-3.8.0.0.xpi and bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean-3.8.0.0.crx from Mother Russia! Well, if the civilized world is so snowflakingly protecting its intellectual property…

Some technical notes

Of course, you shouldn’t use Bypass Firewalls. It’s illegal. It’s theft.

But again, you shouldn’t lie. You should be entirely honest with everyone. Just like the politicians and the corporations do: they never lie, and they never steal. They only charge you fair prices. They only make the best use of your tax money. And pigs fly rather high early in the morning.

Here’s another reason why everyone should be a pirate, while doing their best not to get caught: the levy on the storage media aka the blank media tax. It started with a tax on blank CDs and DVDs (in a few countries it started much earlier, with a tax on audio cassettes), it then extended to HDDs and literally every storage, from USB flash drives to eMMC cards, and to your smartphone, tablet, or media player per se. If it does have digital storage, you paid a special tax for it. Here’s the rationale:

  • Pirating exists, and it incurs losses to the rightful owners of digital contents.
  • So the state must institute a tax (or a levy) on the devices that could be used for piracy, as to store pirated contents. Who cares that such storage media have been designed for legitimate uses? Heck, the fact that a computer has an HDD or an SSD and that your smartphone has storage is not an indication of piracy, especially in business setups! Most people wouldn’t even know how they could do such awful things!
  • Regardless of anything and everything, such a tax is collected. After the losses on their way through the bureaucratic process, this money probably goes to the aforementioned mega-organizations that claim to protect the rights of creators. This time, some money should also go to software makers, such as Microsoft.
  • But how do they know what has been pirated? How do they know the distribution of piracy among the various software titles, films, and music tracks? THEY DO NOT KNOW. They just tax you. What they do with the money is everyone’s guess. There’s a German word (also present in Romanian) that best describes this form of taxation, but the English equivalents don’t do it justice: pauschal.
  • So you’re a CRIMINAL BY DEFAULT. They don’t have to prove that you have pirated anything. You just have to pay a “tax for potentially stealing some digital contents.”

What happened to the the legal principle that everyone is considered innocent until proven guilty, aka the presumption of innocence? This principle is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 11) and in the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 6). In the United States, it is derived from the Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments, which guarantee due process, a fair trial, and protection against self-incrimination. Who cares? You have to pay for piracy that happens in the wild!

But does this give you the right to perform an act of piracy, once you have already paid, as if you already did one? Of course not! You would go to jail!

🏴‍☠️ And this is exactly why you should do piracy. It’s a moral obligation. They already stole money from you, and they have already considered you a criminal. “They” being the Government and whoever collected such taxes.

💡 Back to Bypass Firewalls:

  • Every time your browser says that “Bypass Firewalls requires additional permissions” (with it being disabled until you take action), what it means is that it has added new websites to the list of online newspapers, and it wants to intercept those websites, should you visit them.

💡 As it’s not a cure-all, it doesn’t work on all sites. Here’s what helps when Bypass Firewalls doesn’t:

  • Some newspapers are so dumb, that if you disable JS in the browser, they’ll serve you the entire page. For Firefox, try NJS.
  • Some newspapers offer 1 to 5 free articles, and they keep the count by using cookies. Just delete the cookies related to the respective domains and subdomains.
  • If everything fails, try to add the URL to archive.ph; it might already be there!

I’m sorry for the lack of compassion towards the victims of digital piracy, but I have three pieces of wisdom to share:

  • The xerography didn’t kill the book or the press. The magnetic tape didn’t kill the music. VHS and Betamax didn’t kill the cinema or the TV. And so on: the technologies evolve, and everyone has to adapt or to lose. If they’re smart, they will still remain in business.
  • If you’re a niche performer, creator, or author, I hope you know you’re already cheated by the big labels or the publishing houses that you’re using, right? I mean, they’re using you, not vice versa.
  • If you don’t want to get pirated, don’t make your contents available online.

LATE EDIT: The German jerks

I just wanted to add that even using an ad blocker is technically a theft. So far, they haven’t managed to ban ad blockers, but German publishers are the scumbags of the world. Here’s a partial history:

I don’t trust the German press anyway, and one can hardly find any relevant information from the German mass media. The mainstream newspapers never, but absolutely never, discuss the important issues of the society or of the local community. You cannot even find out what operation the police executed the other day or what arrests they made, because it’s not for the public to know. You saw them on the street stopping cars and arresting people, yet you’ll never know what that was about. The level of secrecy and of avoiding discussing anything that might be too sensitive to some groups has reached a level that has made Germany a country with no real press. This is reminiscent of the former German Democratic Republic, of the Soviet Union, and of China. And you cannot rely on the BILD tabloid. However, I’d rather have the British gutter press than what Germany currently has.

So “stealing” from the German “press” is not stealing, being it by using an ad blocker or by using Bypass Paywalls. This is not free press. Being a journalist in Germany is a misnomer, an oxymoron, or a technical impossibility.

One last tip

Since this doesn’t necessarily imply any download, and since this is about accessing academic works, studies, or articles that have a DOI number, here it is: use sci-hub.se (or sci-hub.st), and you might be able to access some of those that aren’t in free public access.

I’m not sure what to believe about this individual, but on the ethical side, consider this:

The funny thing is that Elsevier would try to charge you even to access those studies that are available for free elsewhere, e.g. on NIH.gov. Such parasites are abject.