Times Writer Tangles With the Ethics of Password-Sharing

If you watch HBO or use Netflix by using a friend’s password, thus managing to avoid paying for the service yourself, is that acceptable digital-native behavior or is it piracy

What if you read the digital edition of The New York Times by leaping over the pay wall with a similar kind of unpaid arrangement

Jenna Wortham, a technology writer for The Times, explored the practice of password-sharing last weekend in Bits, a Sunday Business column. In the process, she talked about some people she knew - and herself. She wrote:

Last Sunday afternoon, some friends and I were hanging out in a local bar, talking about what we’d be doing that evening. It turned out that we all had the same plan: to watch the season premiere of “Game of Thrones.” But only one person in our group had a cable television subscription to HBO, where it is shown. The rest of us had a crafty workaround.

We were each going to use HBO Go, the network’s video Web site, to stream the show online â€" but not our own accounts. To gain access, one friend planned to use the login of the father of a childhood friend. Another would use his mother’s account. I had the information of a guy in New Jersey that I had once met in a Mexican restaurant.

Our behavior â€" sharing password information to HBO Go, Netflix, Hulu and other streaming sites and services â€" appears increasingly prevalent among Web-savvy people who don’t own televisions or subscribe to cable.

Later in the column, Ms. Wortham wrote about how she also uses an account-sharing approach with Netflix. The point of the column was not to explore the ethical issues but the business ones. She interviewed company officials, at least some of whom said that they did not intend to crack down on this practice, “in part because they can’t.”

Some Times readers found the practice unacceptable and found it hard to believe that The Times seemed to blithely accept it in its columnist - especially given its own business model.

One reader, Chris Shaw, put it bluntly in an e-mail:

This article advocates the stealing of online video services, in this case HBO, and states that the author does this frequently. I’m shocked and surprised that the NYTimes supports this. For a company who is struggling to get paid for its content, your reporter is basically telling your readers for everyone to share their passwords so we can avoid paying the NYTimes subscription fees. As someone who has a paid account since the pay wall went up, this upsets me and am now considering dropping my subscription and just sharing a password with someone else - just as Ms. Wortham suggests.

Another reader, Fred Goodwin, wrote to me: “I find it surprising that a NYT columnist would publicly advocate and actively participate in such a practice. This strikes me as tantamount to piracy.”

They raise valid concerns.

Ms. Wortham and her editor, though, see the matter differently.

“The column is supposed to be experimental, and Jenna is deliberately on the frontier - that’s the whole point,” said Jeff Sommer, an assistant business editor who worked with Ms. Wortham to conceive the column idea. “It’s wonderful to have someone who’s ahead of the curve.”

He said he did not see the column as endorsing subscription-sharing but rather describing the situation and looking at the business practices and implications. And he said he had encouraged Ms. Wortham to explore the ethical issues in another column or article.

Ms. Wortham said she hadn’t been surprised by the reaction. “The column tends to be provocative,” she said. “We’re trying to capture the rapidly evolving landscape.”

As for the ethical issues, she said, “It’s a very murky area when the companies themselves don’t really seem to see it as a huge problem.”

In the context of The Times’s own efforts to reinvent its business model in the digital age - with digital subscriptions as a crucial part of that - Ms. Wortham said she “did feel conflicted.”

“I feel passionate about being part of The Times as it makes the transition to the future,” she said. And she noted that many businesses, including The Times, intentionally make their pay walls “porous.”

The Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said that there was no limit on the number of devices that a Times subscriber may use his subscription on, with the average being six.

She added: “We designed our digital subscription model to allow for a generous amount of free content. The pay wall is somewhat porous, intentionally, as we want to remain a part of the global conversation through links from social media. However, we continue to believe that the best experience for Times readers comes via a paid subscription.”

And the model may be tightened in the future, she said.

Does password-sharing with strangers reflect the highest ethics Clearly not.

Ms. Wortham, to her credit, is rethinking her HBO practice.

“I might just go to a bar to watch ‘Game of Thrones,’ ” she said. “I’ll feel better about it.”