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In trying to search for the right analogy to explain the obvious,–i.e. if a news organization puts up a paywall, it is illegal to bypass or hack it to get at the content and, if you’ve paid for access, that doesn’t mean you can share it with all your friends–I have come up with the old-fashioned movie ticket as the comparator. When there is a show at the local cinema you want to see, there is normally only one legal way to watch it. Buy a ticket. And once you have used your ticket to watch the show, you don’t get to give it to someone else to see the next showing, and the next, and the next. Perhaps this is all too obvious, yet people seem to have great difficulty in getting their heads around the simple fact of what a news site paywall is, and why it is there. It’s really pretty simple. It is there to provide access to content (like a ticket) but also to limit access (for those who don’t have a ticket). It is the basic element of the online business model, for news access certainly but also for other forms of content, such as streaming entertainment.

I don’t understand why some people think they should have free access to content that others pay for. There is always someone who wants to beat the system and then thinks up some excuse to justify their actions. I freely admit that paywalls can be annoying, especially if you are surfing the web and come across a random article that you want to read in the Moose Jaw Monitor or the Peoria Progress. It’s almost always all or nothing. No free samples; just an annual subscription, although likely discounted for the first year. But if all you want is that one article there never seems to be a “pay by the item” option. It’s all or nothing. I have come to the conclusion that in most such cases I can either live without it or sometimes, if I search hard enough, I can find the same thing elsewhere, unpaywalled. What I don’t do is hack it.

A recent discussion of the ethics of paywalls examined the thorny question of whether it was ok to cheat—but just once in a while and under certain circumstances. The unconvincing conclusion: it depends. However, if you believe in the value of curated news–and most people do although they are remarkably resistant to paying for it (a recent Pew Research Center survey indicated that 83% of Americans had not paid for news in the past year; in Canada the numbers are comparable with 15% saying they were willing to pay, up from 11% a year earlier)—then it is only logical that the more free rides people take, the less responsible news coverage is going to be produced. You are eating your own seed grain. As someone put it, the garbage is free and the quality stuff has to be paid for.

The most recent example of success in combatting paywall-busters was the recent announcement that the News Media Alliance, the trade association in the US for major news publishers, had secured the removal of a website that existed to enable users to bypass paywalls, known as 12ft.io. It was self-described as a 12 ft. ladder to get over a 10 ft. wall. According to an article in the Verge, the site also allowed users to view webpages without ads, trackers, or pop-ups by disguising a user’s browser as a web crawler, giving them unfettered access to a webpage’s contents. Now it is out of business. The Alliance doesn’t say how it achieved this feat but does say that it will “continue to take similar actions against other purveyors of unauthorized paywall bypassing technologies.”

While certain elements of the public (academics? other journalists? researchers?) seem to think they can lay claim to justifications to bypass paywalls, an act that is illegal in both the US and Canada if a “technological protection measure” (TPM), aka a digital lock, is circumvented, the most egregious example of paywall-busting is the Government of Canada itself, the same government that is responsible for the Copyright Act. As I have noted a couple of times, (“The integrity of journalism paywalls is under threat. The Government of Canada should settle the Blacklock’s case”; “Does the Trudeau government really support Canadian media? Saying One Thing but Doing Another”), if the Government of Canada, which spends millions on media and communications, cannot be bothered to obtain a licence to access paywall-protected material, how can they expect ordinary citizens to respect paywalls.

The issue is the $148 individual subscription taken out by an employee of Parks Canada back in 2013, a subscription that the Government of Canada through the Attorney-General argues should allow it to reproduce and pass around individual articles within a large government department without obtaining an institutional subscription. This all hinges on a complicated case, originally brought by Blacklock’s Reporter, an online investigative journalism enterprise, but then pursued by the Crown after Blacklock’s withdrew, in which the A-G argued that it was entitled to access the paywalled content on the basis of fair dealing. While it is illegal to circumvent a TPM/digital lock for the purpose of accessing TPM-protected content, the issue was whether a password constitutes a TPM. Logically, I think most people would assume that it does, but the judge ruled that evidence had not been presented to conclude that was the case. One line of argument is that a password is not a digital lock; rather it is a digital key to a digital lock (TPM). Therefore if someone licitly obtains the key (the password), are they entitled to share it with others as long as the purpose of the sharing is for a fair dealing purpose, such as research or education? That is the nub of the issue. Some observers proclaimed that this case proved that fair dealing trumped or allowed the bypassing of a TPM. That was not the court’s conclusion, as I pointed out (here) but the ruling effectively gutted password protection for businesses. A recent internal memorandum produced for the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture by his department noted that “The use of passwords to limit access to copyright protected content is a common business practice among online platforms including news sites, streaming services and video game digital distribution services,” …“Rights holders may be concerned that passwords and paywalls are no longer seen as effective technological protection measures.”

The ruling is now under appeal, with a decision expected later this fall. Blacklock’s is a small David pitted against the taxpayer-funded, deep-pocketed Goliath of the Government of Canada, but I understand they may be getting some financial help from other paywall-dependent businesses. I hope so. The right thing to do would be for the Government of Canada to settle with Blacklock’s but maybe this wouldn’t remove ambiguities about the role of paywalls. An appeal court ruling may be needed. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, inconvenient as it may be, and recognizing that it is impossible to subscribe to everything you could possibly want at any given time, respect the integrity and the work of the journalists and their employers who bring you curated news, commentary and valuable reportage. Pay for what you can–and play by the rules for the rest.

© Hugh Stephens, 2025. All Rights Reserved.

This article was originally published on HughStephensBlog