They have been having a fine time posting messages to Poynter’s Feedback site on whether using a bugmenot.com password to bypass required registration screens now used by many newspapers is ethical.
Haven’t heard of bugmenot? Just go to www.bugmenot.com, enter the URL for a newspaper or other site whose required registration you want to avoid, and bugmenot will give you an ID and password that will get you in.
Fun, huh? But is it ethical?
Many posters say no, it is stealing.
Others say, in essence, so what? Is it right for newspapers to waste my time with a registration screen so that they can better bombard me with advertising and sell my email address to spammers? After all, the content is free once you are registered.
Registration screens are a pain. We don’t know anyone who likes filling them out. Perhaps if newspapers figured out a better way of treating their customers, the customers wouldn’t need to spend so much time arguing whether it is ethical to cheat the newspapers.