Is it always illegal to bypass digital restrictions?

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Couldn't think of a decent, punchy title for this, but as an example of the stuff I'm referring to, I've recently noticed that you can bypass or block the 'paywall' on one or two online publications that require a subscription by using certain browser extensions which filter scripts and the like, eg NoScript.

More controversially, it's possible to obtain 'cracks' for the premium or 'pro' versions of some Windows programs, or so I've heard. These cracks often take the form of executables that you can apparently insert into the program files folders on the 'C' drive and 'activate' the program. A lot of these don't seem to work, but some (allegedly) do.

I've also discovered, purely in the interests of research, that it's not too difficult for someone with a bit of determination to 'activate' various versions of Windows without purchasing a licence. Microsoft even allow you to download the iso of these operating systems free of charge these days, and they don't really try to make it difficult to use unlicenced versions of Windows 8 or Windows 10, unlike in the old days of XP and Vista.

I'm not so much interested in the morality of this, as the legalities. As to the former, I've never felt much enthusiasm for concepts like copyright, 'intellectual property' or DRM (Digital Rights Management), and feel that the whole business of claiming 'ownership' of an idea is dubious. Some of the ways that pharmaceutical companies extend the patents on their drugs by making minute changes to their composition, for example, strikes me as downright fraudulent and an abuse of the system.

But as to the latter issue, can it really be illegal if you discover that a certain newspaper which requires a subscription can be read in full for free simply because you're using a perfectly legal browser extension? I actually discovered this by accident, as I was able to read such a newspaper without signing in, with the browser extension just operating in default mode and with no specific configuration being necessary. For what it's worth, I've just renewed my subscription to this newspaper, though I don't really need to. Crazy or what? And isn't the constant battle of wits between 'hackers' and software companies something that the latter should learn to live with - it's not as if they lack the resources to fight back in most cases. It's notable that Google is constantly modifying its programming to attempt to prevent people who use 4K Downloader from downloading YouTube video clips, and 4K constantly develops its product to stay ahead of Google. This has been going on for years, but I don't think Google has tried to use the legal system to get its way, and downloading software is freely available in the form of applications or browser extensions. A 'grey area' perhaps? All's fair in love and war, maybe?

At one end of this spectrum there might well be genuine elements of criminality involved, but at the other end, or even in the middle, I'm not at all sure that this is the case. Does anyone here feel radically differently about these things, or fully agree, for that matter?

I used to have a browser extension that allowed me to remove any element of a page I clicked on. Great for annoying ads.
It also worked for on-screen elements that "locked" a page until you signed up or something like that.

A lot of pages you can also view source to see things "hidden".

I think this is kind of like video taping a sporting event. It is probably illegal, but neither you nor the copyright holder really cares if you are not doing it on a large scale. It is illegal to copy a DVD onto your hard drive (and bypass the copy protraction in the process) but it starts becoming downright immoral if you start selling copies.

People have a right to benefit or even make a living from creative stuff they do. I wright software, I expect to get payed for it.
Some people write software for free and put it under a "copyleft" that is ok too.

Try to look at from the other person's point of view.

it's at the least a legal grey area to use an extension like noscript. After all, it is part of the business-model of a lot of websites to run javascripts on your computer, follow you around, and sell that data to advertisement companies to place targeted ads.

forbidding this is damging that businessmodel.

Personally, I'm for burning this businessmodel to the ground and scatter its ashes into the ocean. I think it's harmful and therefore a moral obligation -apart from a safety issue- to block scripts.
on occasion, that also removes a paywall or something like that. That is morally wrong, but negligable in the grander fight against data collection and for your right to privacy.

Yes, it's the 'grey area' stuff that most interests me. I suppose that using a VPN to circumvent regional restrictions comes under that heading as well. And I do wonder why some of the biggest organizations don't really bother to make piracy or other infringement more difficult, still less pursue legal remedies. Google's cat and mouse game with the YouTube downloading merchants being a good example, and the way Microsoft makes it so easy these days to run unregistered software: you'd have been locked out of Windows XP or Vista after 30 days with an illegal version, but with Windows 7, 8 and 10 there's no real penalty.

I don't actually use any dodgy software, as my needs are pretty basic, and the free versions fulfill all my requirements . I do confess to being fascinated by these issues though, and think that had I been born twenty years later I could have ended up as a hacker of sorts. I confine all my 'research' within virtual machines, and my interest is essentially academic. I just love some of those 'customized' versions of Windows, especially the XP-Vista hybrids like XP Vienna or XP Black, and the exotic stuff like XP Gold and XP Red Vortex. There are some crazy versions of Win 7 as well. These products are of no practical value, most of them probably contain malware, and you'd be mad to run any of them as an everyday operating system.

Usually no, none of these things are illegal, regardless of companies trying to make you think they are.

Some jurisdictions may have specific laws regarding some things (i.e. distribution of cracked software, vs actually cracking it for personal use). Companies may also sue just to inconvenience people they don't like, citing laws which are only peripherally relevant and may not be applicable. If you're researching software-cracking lawsuits in your locality, make careful note of the actual laws that are being claimed to be broken. Sometimes it's as weak as "the company claims it would have been more profitable by ninety million dollars if Joe Smith hadn't cracked that one copy of EdgarWare 1.0, even though this is clearly BS".

Legality is a very different kettle of fish to actually being prosecuted and hit up for damages for doing something.

Most computer nerds have been self engineering/reverse engineering software for a very long time. Part of it is the challenge of doing so, part of it is because they know they can without repercussions.

If you don't tell anyone you're doing it nobody is going to know.
Don't make it obvious, don't tell anyone.

That's all very true. Working on a hobby project for yourself involving reverse-engineering is worlds away from trying to churn a profit off of somebody else's intellectual property - but they're going to notice and get angry if you actually attempt the latter, and personally I don't blame them at all if it gets to that level, because at that point it's kind of like stealing - maybe it's like stealing from Walmart, but that still hurts all of us in the process and should be punished.

A lot of the time, I like to think that it's the intent that matters - bypassing DRM to use something you paid full price for so that you can use it on your second computer (although technically unethical, depending on the circumstance) is not quite the same thing as opening up a shop and selling the whole kit for your own personal gain, off of the hard work that somebody else (including third-parties) has sunk into it. If we bankrupted all of the developers in the world, innovation would be lost entirely and we'd seriously never have nice things.

Don't forget that some of the perceived 'gray areas' for the enduser (the ones deemed not-illegal to use, mind you) actually involve criminal activity (allegedly), whereas the 'sharing on a p2p network' side of it probably involves less harm to other humans. A perfectly good example of this is Steam keys - there are gray-market websites that have potential ties to money-laundering schemes, and rip off developers thanks to refund policies (to the point that gamedevs themselves, in their own words, would rather people simply download and share the content in an unauthorized setting than use the gray-market service), which completely turns the idea of a gray-market on its head entirely. At what cost? It's not so gray when people are losing their jobs over it and paying money out of pocket for your price cuts.

In a perfect world, we wouldn't even have to debate this because we'd all understand that there are pros and cons to pretty much everything you could imagine - as well as an ethical side vs a dark side. This is what makes discussions like these, and that ever-popular 'gray area' so interesting to me as time goes on, especially because preserving media is going to get more and more important as older mediums die out and nobody can access them anymore. Video games, movies, television shows and beyond could easily sink into a point of no return due to corporate greed, never leaving their legacy for future generations to marvel at, never being able to be part of future museums, and so on.

Yeah, it is an ethical dilemma with as many answers as there are people.

Which reminds me of a great quote from a movie - Solaris:
"There are no answers, only choices"

Personally, I am a lot less strict with copyright than I used to be before I became physically disabled and could hold down a job and afford things more easily.

Google, youtube and 4kdownloader are a whole other story, because if you just subscribe to youtube premium then you can download anyhow.

Curious as to which paper no script lets you into now. I can think of one major one that I sometimes read by going to the web archive.

:s

LOL, the same paper, it seems. Nice, that is easier
Thx

Anyone want to know how to ah circumvent certain annoying time limits on some particular musical software?

Assuming this refers to my original post, the paper is The Daily Telegraph, and the 'filtering' device is Umatrix. It seems to block a process called 'Tinypass', which would normally restrict access to the content.

Probably, but I highly doubt anyone's gonna go after you if it's just for personal use. The problems start when you start redistributing the pirated software and sell it to other people.

From business law, VPNs are kind of challenging in terms of figuring out which legal system has jurisdiction over the matter. Just online in general causes a split between the two halves of the action, a VPN potentially introduces a 3rd, or possibly more, location where the action might be dealt with.

In practice though, businesses usually would rather have some money than none and it's more the licensors that are concerned with people from the wrong region using the materials that were presumalby licensed either to a different company or at a different rate.

I do think that eventually it will be settled case law in most jurisdictions, but right now, it's tough to say what the actual liability would be. Although the safest bet would be that your liable for it where you are, and whatever the local laws say goes.

Personally I never thought of using NoScript as a paywall-defeating device, and didn't think it was capable of that.

I'm no legal expert, but I wouldn't think NoScript would still be with us if it wasn't legal. I suppose it's rather like a stick, i.e. it could be used to commit a crime (I'm assuming you're correct that NoScript can be) but it's legal to possess and to use for benign purposes or reasonable self-defense.

The normal purpose of NoScript is to block scripts that might be detrimental to the user - in fact by default it blocks all scripts and the user has to actively unblock the desired ones. My policy is to only unblock scripts that I find I need for using the Web. Some scripts are detrimental to the user - wasting the user's system resources, and often quietly mining private details that could end up anywhere, but more worryingly still, allowing a script puts the user's computer at the mercy of whoever wrote it. So I see NoScript as an important security measure, and morally sound, particularly as websites are so secretive about the details of what their scripts actually do. If that accidentally gets me past a paywall I never knew existed, tough.

I've noticed that ad blockers usually have a feature for the user to actively block chosen page elements. I haven't used one to get through an actual paywall that wants money for a service, but I've noticed they can be used for getting through some of those annoying paywall-like things that stop me accessing content unless I create a free account (which would usually demand personal details), and for stopping those nagging popups that make it difficult to browse the site without frequently clicking a "go away" button or doing something else I'd rather not have to do.

As far as I can see it's morally acceptable to thwart those things, especially when the website uses "bait-and-switch" tactics, e.g. letting me get halfway through reading a page and then starting the nags and "paywalls." If they were up-front about exactly what was going to happen, they might have more of a point, but the nearest to that I've seen has been a long, confusing "privacy agreement" that nobody ever reads. IMO they're not entitled to have it both ways - if they hide their invasiveness then they can hardly complain when people block that invasiveness.

And as you suggest, their business model is horrible and deserves to be wrecked. I even read about one plugin project that was hoping to inject junk into the collected tracking data and render the whole dataset useless. AFAIK the project never got completed, but I can't say I thoroughly disapproved of the idea. If we don't fight back, I shudder to think what the advertisers and snoopers would be free to do.

So no, I don't think it's always illegal to bypass digital restrictions, and I don't see anything immoral about it as long as the user isn't trying to avoid paying a fair rate for something that's up-front clearly labelled with a price tag. I just think it's a shame that it's the big, overpaid businesses that have the best access to clever lawyers and other anti-bypass equipment.

I would suggest hiring a lawyer to find out this question.A lawyer would be a much better person to ask than we would be.

^ I have no intention of ever contributing a single penny to the legal profession.