But I fully intend to pay the NY Times subscription fee. Despite all the bitching we do, they are still the one of the primary go to news sources for me and for many others, and they are head and shoulders above most of the competition.
I won’t like paying it, especially since I know it is free, but I’ve always held a sort of firm line on this sort of thing. I don’t download illegal music even though I could, and never have. I buy the cd and import it, or I buy a digital copy. I don’t use hacked warez, and if there is shareware out there that I use and like, I gladly send them 10-15 bucks when they ask for it. I don’t watch pirated videos. It isn’t because I have money to burn (I don’t) or because I am some super moral being (a quick perusal of this blog will dispel that notion rather rapidly), but simply because I believe that if I like something, the only way people will continue to make the product and continue to provide me with what I like is to buy it. That’s really the only thing that matters. If the NY Times doesn’t make money, they will cease to exist. The only way I can help to keep that from happening is to buy their product.
The problem I have is that often times you are punished for this- I am going to pay for the Times, but now I am going to have to find a way to work around the paywall in order to quote them and provide links so that those of you who do not pay for the service can still access some form of the article. I’m having a similar sort of punishment the last few nights with Dragon Age: Origins. For reasons that remain a mystery, even though I have bought the program and registered it, it still requires me to have the disc in the computer to run. That makes no sense to me- it should be disabled as soon as you register. Only paying customers have this problem, because I could easily go to any warez site and get a no-cd hack. But I don’t, because that’s just not how I roll. I’m sure mistermix could explain why this is, and it probably has to do with DRM.
I know that DougJ and Mistermix are focusing on the ham-handed nature of the paywall rollout, but I do think it is important for those of you who value the work the Times and other folks provide to realize why you should, if you can, pay for it.