I am not really convinced of this case. Of course you can compensate for that. You can buy the Chicago Tribune. Now you may say that is exaggerated, for just one article. But when you buy the NYT and the WSJ, you also pay for a lot of articles you don’t care about. I think in this case we can hope that there are other people who buy the Chicago Tribune and also sometimes read an article in the NYT without paying for that. Or maybe you sometimes buy the NYT and every once in a while you buy the CT. In a certain social equilibrium, a variety of newspapers can exist, and I think that is more relevant than the exact payment or profit at the margin.
Now technology has changed, and there are paywalls. As in the case of the newspapers, the ethics of using an app that circumvents paywalls may depend on the way you use it, and on the social equilibrium. But it’s hard to say how exactly, and which behavior should generalize.
I am not really convinced of this case. Of course you can compensate for that. You can buy the Chicago Tribune. Now you may say that is exaggerated, for just one article. But when you buy the NYT and the WSJ, you also pay for a lot of articles you don’t care about. I think in this case we can hope that there are other people who buy the Chicago Tribune and also sometimes read an article in the NYT without paying for that. Or maybe you sometimes buy the NYT and every once in a while you buy the CT. In a certain social equilibrium, a variety of newspapers can exist, and I think that is more relevant than the exact payment or profit at the margin.
Now technology has changed, and there are paywalls. As in the case of the newspapers, the ethics of using an app that circumvents paywalls may depend on the way you use it, and on the social equilibrium. But it’s hard to say how exactly, and which behavior should generalize.