Read This News Site And They Will Hunt You Down And Sue You

By October 29, 2010

The North Country Gazette, an online-only publication based in Chestertown, NY, wants you to know that reading their site without a subscription is serious business. How serious? Well, if you read more than one page on the site without a subscription, the site owner claims that she will use your IP address to track you down and sue you.

The site is now entirely password-protected after earning negative attention for the policy. (This probably would have been a better option in the first place.) BoingBoing captured the warnings while they were still up. For emphasis, one was in red Comic Sans.

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This isn’t the site owner’s first experience with creative interpretations of copyright law. The North Country Gazette’s fair-use policy also made a cameo appearance in a legal ethics blog in 2006. The site publisher, in turn, sued the blogger for defamation.

Local newspaper boasts ultimate passive-aggressive paywall policy [BoingBoing]

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Comments

  1. Destron says:
    October 30, 2010 at 6:36 am

    Good thing he is only going after Verizon Droids…. guess i’m safe on my T-Mobile Android.

  2. techphets says:
    October 30, 2010 at 12:32 pm

    This lady does not have the emotional intelligence required to extract the amount of money she wants from, well, anyone. I respect banks and their overdraft fees, casinos, check-cashing places, and even CASH4GOLD more than her.

  3. lordargent says:
    October 30, 2010 at 9:02 pm

    I wonder what they would do if I wrote a perl script to turn it into a RSS feed.

  4. Winteridge2 says:
    October 31, 2010 at 1:16 pm

    But is it ok if I just luk at the pikturs? I doesn’t read so well. And I have no munee.

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