Well, I’m a software engineer and, offhand, I can’t think of any legal way that it can be done, especially if the client is on the other side of a firewall.

“but to make something sufficiently difficult as to deter most basic users from bothering.”

But what I described is trivially easy, even for a non-technical user.

I’ve seen studies suggesting that in certain demographics something like 90% of the music being listened-to is acquired through file-sharing – despite that fact that it’s illegal and it requires a lot more technical prowess than defeating metered-content schemes. I’m a music collector who’s spent over $20,000 acquiring music LEGALLY so obviously I think good stuff is worth paying-for, but I think that attitude is going out of style. Another example of this problem is public broadcasting where NPR and PBS have had to resort to increasingly strident methods to try to get people to pay.

Alternatively, consider Major League Baseball where many teams (including my local Boston Red Sox) are no longer broadcast on “free” TV – they’re only available for an expensive cable subscription, and they’re one of the richest teams in the league. So I think forcing people to pay works best, IF it can be done, but I don’t think the newspaper industry can pull it off. I hope I’m wrong because I love newspapers.

But that’s beside the point. As with any Digital Rights Management scheme, which is kind of what metered content is, the idea is not to make something unhackable, but to make something sufficiently difficult as to deter most basic users from bothering. Or in other words, make it easier to play by the rules than not by the rules.

You’re right, you can get around paywalls and metered walls, and I think you’ll always be able to. It’s not about forcing</em. people to pay, it’s about convincing them to want to.

To test my idea I went to the FT website and started clicking on articles until I got the message telling me I had to register to read more (I wasn’t counting but I think it was 5 or 6 articles) . So I did a “Clear Private Data” (which in my case clears almost everything) in my Firefox browser (one mouse click) and the FT forgot I had ever been there and just let me keep reading more articles!

So as I feared in my earlier comment, metered content seems easy to defeat because there’s no robust way to identify “you” as the “same” reader across sessions.

So my assumption is that since the FT business model depends on them developing a loyal user base, and anyone can access any article at any time for free, then it’s probably not worth the effort to track down the people who are scraping their content.

That said, I’m not 100% sure I’m right.

Sites like attributor.com are beginning to make possible automated offsite content monitoring and control, and I expect to see more as forced consolidation occurs and the survivors start looking for ways to maximize content value.

I don’t know offhand if they’re doing anything about work being republished outside the paywall. I’m guessing it’s largely a non-issue because the people who are likely to read scraped content are not part of the core brand enthusiasts (or maybe, 1,000 true fans) that they are relying on for subscription revenue—everyone else gets the content for “free” anyway.