Is it against the Computer Misuse Act to bypass a client-side paywall?

Question

A common practice among news websites is to provide articles online, where an initial portion is freely viewable, and the remainder requires an active subscription. However, on numerous occasions, I have found that this is done through merely blurring or covering up the remaining text with client-side elements that can be disabled with simple 'inspect-element' tools provided by browsers.

Is it violating the Computer Misuse Act 1990 to disable those elements and read the news article?

A couple of points to emphasize:

The article was already permissibly present on my machine.
No data is being sent back; it's just a matter of how my computer interprets the data they gave me.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 04 '22 at 17:48

The relevant section (§1) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 states

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if— (a) he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer, or to enable any such access to be secured; (b) the access he intends to secure, or to enable to be secured, is unauthorised; and (c) he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.

When a content-provider puts content "out in the open" in the described fashion, e.g. with a visible snippet of text, they are implicitly authorizing people to access the content (notice that web pages do not have to overtly announce "You are authorized to read this notice"). One approach to narrowing the access so granted is via a log-in scheme which send a portion of text then a "teaser", plus code which (upon authentication) loads the full page. Circumventing that method of access is a violation of the act.

Another method would be to include the entire content, by blurring, printing white on white, or some other form of display obfuscation, where display = scramble(plaintext). For example

<!DOCTYPE html><html> <head><title>Title</title><style>
#blur {font-size: 40px; color: transparent; text-shadow: 0 0 16px #000;  }
</style></head><body><div id="blur">Pay money to see this </div></body></html>

When you enter your authorization code, the host computer performs a function (eliminates the scrambling in the code it sends to your computer, change 16 to 0). But you may be able to get the same result by inspecting the page source.

The crucial wording of the act says "causes a computer to perform any function...", but the host computer is not performing any function at all at this point, indeed the host may have melted down. The owner of the client computer can authorize his own computer to perform functions on data legally received from a host (you can read a web page, you can zoom in and out, all being locally-executed functions).

So it depends on the method of obfuscation used by the host. With that caveat, your analysis is correct.

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Nov 03 '22 at 17:07

united-states

I believe it wouldn’t fall under computer abuse, but it might be covered by the DMCA.

Let’s say I rent a digital movie. It gets downloaded to my computer. It is marked as “rental movie, may be played twice until Dec 3rd”. This is checked on my computer by DRM without contacting any server. And I remove this information and now I can keep that movie and it will play forever. That would be coverdd red by the DMCA, and your situation seems quite similar.

Comments: Anyone asking “Am I breaking law X if I do Y” can be assumed to want to know about whether they break over laws as well. DMCA: A rented movie is DRM protected just like a DRM protected video or music file. I would bet that companies doing this will do it in a way that making the movie playable forever will break the DMCA.

Is it against the Computer Misuse Act to bypass a client-side paywall?

2 Answers2