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.

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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