The Next Step: Gophers' Carlie Wagner eyeing WNBA career













Once billionaires start paying that 70% marginal tax rate, maybe I’ll start feeling sorry for them. Not.

And, apparently, you also won't feel sorry for the non-billionaire staffers who do the work but won't get paid by the billionaires if no one buys their work?
 

And, apparently, you also won't feel sorry for the non-billionaire staffers who do the work but won't get paid by the billionaires if no one buys their work?

That’s not how it works. Staff get paid salaries. Subscriptions are a way to add to the billionaire’s profits.

Like I said, I got the article to work. It’s not a high security thing. It’s like an ad-blocker nag screen. So I just turn off the ad-blocker to view the page, and that’s how they get paid, just like most internet sites. They just hope they can get the less savvy people to buy subscriptions to add to the billionaire’s profits. If I had to pay for an article, it’s not worth it to me. That’s my choice, not yours. I already pay for internet access and there’s a wealth of information out without paying for additional subscriptions.
 


So the rumors are true.

After reading her post on the Players Tribune, I'm actually relieved. Cuz after her last-year sometimes shooting slump, I worried that she might be sick, or something.

To learn that her sabbatical (she doesn't mention coming back to Pro Hoops, but we all hope she does) is due to her religious convictions and aspirations is a big relief.
 
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That’s not how it works. Staff get paid salaries. Subscriptions are a way to add to the billionaire’s profits.

Like I said, I got the article to work. It’s not a high security thing. It’s like an ad-blocker nag screen. So I just turn off the ad-blocker to view the page, and that’s how they get paid, just like most internet sites. They just hope they can get the less savvy people to buy subscriptions to add to the billionaire’s profits. If I had to pay for an article, it’s not worth it to me. That’s my choice, not yours. I already pay for internet access and there’s a wealth of information out without paying for additional subscriptions.

I work at the newspaper. You are wrong. It is not free.
 

First, why are you posting the article here when it is not about Carlie? Second, I agree that we should support and keep in business our local newspaper, no matter how much the owner makes in other businesses. By the way, I also support higher tax rates on high incomes but I am pretty confident that Taylor is not making a large return on the Strib.
 

First, why are you posting the article here when it is not about Carlie?
I’ve converted it into a general WNBA/Lynx thread, as I’ve stated before. I started the thread, so it’s something I feel comfortable doing.

Second, I agree that we should support and keep in business our local newspaper, no matter how much the owner makes in other businesses.
What’s this “we” business? Each individual should make their own choices for themselves. Let’s not be so presumptuous to assume that everyone is in the same situation can afford to pay for things they don’t even need to buy. Like I said, Internet ads pay support most free sites. If I had to subscribe to the StarTrib to read its content, I would chose not to. To me, the quality of the content does not support the demand for a subscription. It’s up to each individual to decide for themselves.

By the way, I also support higher tax rates on high incomes but I am pretty confident that Taylor is not making a large return on the Strib.

It was his choice to buy it. Are you saying he made a poor business choice? Feeling sorry for him is not in the cards for me.
 

It was his choice to buy it. Are you saying he made a poor business choice? Feeling sorry for him is not in the cards for me.

Support local journalism or don't support local journalism. It's your choice. But consuming it while not supporting it is a poor choice.
 

Support local journalism or don't support local journalism. It's your choice. But consuming it while not supporting it is a poor choice.

You guys realize they make money by running ads, don’t you? It’s not really being made clear if you realize that. It’s kind of like how free television works. Must be my poor communication skills, because I repeat it over and over and it just doesn’t seem to sink in. Should everybody be obligated to pay for over the air television? Are you guys feeling guilty because you’re “paying nothing” for the journalism you view on WCCO, KSTP, KMSP, KARE? Lemme see the receipts for your donations to these poor media companies.

Like I said before, I was able to view the article through no illegal means. I just didn’t figure out how at first. So why are trying to lay the guilt trips? That’s awful judgy.
 
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You guys realize they make money by running ads, don’t you? It’s not really being made clear if you realize that. It’s kind of like how free television works. Must be my poor communication skills, because I repeat it over and over and it just doesn’t seem to sink in. Should everybody be obligated to pay for over the air television? Are you guys feeling guilty because you’re “paying nothing” for the journalism you view on WCCO, KSTP, KMSP, KARE? Lemme see the receipts for your donations to these poor media companies.

Like I said before, I was able to view the article through no illegal means. I just didn’t figure out how at first. So why are trying to lay the guilt trips? That’s awful judgy.

We keep repeating it because we do realize what you are saying and you are wrong. Is this clear? You are stealing.
 

That’s ridiculous. Either you don’t understand how internet ads work or (seeing who is responding like this) you’re looking for a reason to harass me. Now that’s very wrong. Reportably wrong.

How about everybody take a deep breath and stop generating more hard feelings than have already been made over something like this.
 

Can someone do me a favor and reproduce this entire article. The usual tricks aren’t working for me.
http://m.startribune.com/lynx-begin-retooling-roster-on-first-day-of-free-agency/505215642/

I'll quit because it seems you are not ever going to get it but, in this post, you literally asked people to steal content. And here is the place on the Star Tribune website where it says not to do it (for those who are confused about whether it's OK to steal things):
http://www.startribune.com/permission-to-license-star-tribune-content/246166341/
 


We keep repeating it because we do realize what you are saying and you are wrong. Is this clear? You are stealing.

Look the Strib can do what most other newspapers across the country do and put a stop to all this in 10 minutes if they wanted to. No one is stealing anything.
 

Can someone show me how to access that reprint permissions page http://m.startribune.com/permission-to-license-star-tribune-content/246166341 since I'm being blocked by a paywall.

Ha ha just kidding, honestly, I thought a little levity might help here.

I agree we should probably table this discussion as it's going nowhere. But first there's a few copyright facts that have not been stated (and which the Strib conveniently neglected to mention) that should be outlined, for reference by us posters who regularly embed pointers to online media articles (plus a few quotes as teasers).

I happen to be more expert on various aspects of copyright law (which is ridiculously complicated) than I ever wanted to be, because my student team chose that subject for a U class project.

As far as it goes, the Strib permission page is a decent summary of guidelines that one should follow if one wants to reproduce an article in its entirety (or substantial fraction thereof). For that you generally must license the material for re-use, with a few exceptions as noted (and probably a few more not noted).

But there is another important concept in copyright law called the Fair Use Doctrine that the Strib does not mention since it doesn't want to be your tour guide to the loopholes. More on that in conjunction with (a) below.

Nothing in the permission-to-license page says anything about:
(a) The types of reference and partial quoting that folks like us GopherHolers do all the time;
(b) The whole subject of paywalls in general;
and (c) Whether or not it's criminal or just naughty or just bad karma or just cheapskate for someone like Shades to do some lightweight hacking so as to find a loophole in the paywall implementation in order to simply read a paywall-protected page.

Of these issues, (a) is the most significant to GopherHolers, and we should probably focus more on that, rather than on flinging epithets at Shades such as naughty cheapskate bad-karma criminal.

(a) is one of the places where the Fair Use Doctrine applies. Fair use is things like when you reference and quote parts of a publication or multimedia work in your term-paper. You can quote reasonably sized portions to help make your point. And of course you should make proper attribution, or else it's plagiarism. And under Fair Use you can do all this without licensing or getting any sort of permission from the publisher.

These Fair Use rules are the mechanism under which we all quite legally post URL pointers to relevant online articles in many of our GopherHole posts. The point I should scold us a bit on, though, is that sometimes we quote too much of the article along with the URL. In order to leverage Fair Use to include part of the text, it must be just that - PART of the text. It's hard to give a good guideline, but I'd say that if we quote more than half, then that's not Fair Use.

Most of us are pretty good about this. And in reality, the Strib or Pioneer Press is not going to sue us, since we're bringing traffic to their web site, and some decent fraction of those visitors may end up subscribing (minus Shades, apparently). So the guideline when we do these URL pointer posts is, don't quote the whole darn thing - leave some value-added for actually visiting the article's web site. Whether or not you want to also mention the author or publication date should be up to you. Most of us know who these authors are, so no biggie. And besides, one click and you can get to the actual article and see the author and pub date. Unless you're paywalled out. In that case I figure too bad, they prevented me from seeing the original, so be it, it's up to me to decide if I want to subscribe.

Item (b) is a mess still being sorted out by the courts. It's so new that there's no definitive resolution to the issue of "what if I am tricky enough to bypass a paywall, and do, will the cops be raiding my house soon?"

In principle, these sorts of things were supposed to have been sorted out by the relatively recent update to copyright law known as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). But in practice it's more messy than what the DMCA could resolve. If you want to read more than you wanted to know about this, see Section III of Copyright, Competition and Publishers' Pursuit of Online Compensation https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_comments/2009/11/544505-00022.pdf .

Part of the problem is that there is no truly good way to implement foolproof paywalls, without requiring extra clicks that would annoy your paying customers. So with the current generation of paywalls, publishers generally have to settle for partial solutions that result in 99% of would-be viewers making a bonafide choice between paying-and-viewing or not viewing. This is a satisfactory solution for most publishers.

As to question (c), some people might claim that Shades and other people who find a way to bypass paywalls are merely clever. On the other hand, some legal experts might claim that doing so is in violation of the DMCA. Other lawyers argue that better technology plus technology-specific extensions to copyright law are needed in order to clarify and resolve these issues.

There are some copyrightist conservatives who actually argue that Google is violating the copyright of every web page when it crawls the web and makes digital copies to index the pages so that we can search them (even though no human ever reads the crawled pages per se). That's obviously a step too far.

So what are we to do with that possibly-illegal but possibly-just-clever Shades? I think Shades has received punishment enough by receiving a bit of verbal abuse in his own thread. The Strib is not going to prosecute, for sure.

Personally, my own intention is to eventually subscribe to the Strib package that gives you the Sunday paper plus online access. But I've been too busy lately to do so. So in the interim I just read online Strib articles when it lets me, and say "oh well" when it doesn't. I actually like the Strib's paywall implementation. They give you N views per month (not sure what N is). But it 's pro-rated. So if it blocks you, you can usually wait a week, and it will give you another view. So you just hoard your views and spend them only on those articles that you really, really want to read. To me, that's a user-friendly implementation of pay-wall that encourages one to eventually pay up.

Regardless of any legalities or lack of well-defined legal guidelines about new-found copyright issues triggered by new computer-based technologies, I do believe that we have a social responsibility to keep our journalism facilities going and financially viable. I would not even be opposed to levying a journalism tax for their support (as radical as that concept sounds). Journalism is the foundation of democracy, let alone needed for sports.

If all the independent journalism companies go bankrupt, do we then have to fear that the bankruptcy of democracy is not far behind? Try reading the state-owned journalism in China to see what "fake news" is truly like.
 
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