[shadowflit]

As far as I could tell, you "donate" $5 dollars a month to Kachingle, and they distribute this donation (after taking their cut) according to the sites you visit. It seems as if they are trying to "stop the paywall" by demonstrating an alternate way to generate the revenue, and in so doing convince sites that instituting a paywall is unnecessary. So, no, it seems no paywalls are being circumvented.

However, I don't get why they're sending the payment to the blog's email address and not the NYT (disclaimer: don't know how the NYT blogs work). It seems to me Kachingle would be better applied at the site level. Given my limited understanding, I can definitely see how applying it at this granular level would annoy NYT - their paywall solution would make money for NYT first (and trickle down later) whereas this seems to make money for the bloggers first, and not for NYT. At the very least, payment should be split between NYT and the specific blogger. (And if this is incorrect and the payment is in fact going to NYT - then why on earth do they send it to so many different places?!)

I like the idea of Kachingle for reading across multiple sites, but the NYT blog situation just seems weird. No matter what though - assuming my evaluation is even correct - figuring this stuff out took way too much digging and reading on Kachingle's site.

[bugsy]

Both of you are correct they are not circumventing anything. Their plugin is just to track which blogs, which are freely available, you are actually reading so they know how to split your $5 according to what you actually read each month.

They don't have to send the money to anyone. They could keep it for themselves. But if they did no one would use the service as it wouldn't make sense. Instead they donate to the writers personally. It's the same idea as United Way collecting donations and then forwarding those donations to various causes, while keeping a bit for overhead.

Not illegal. If they were hosting content, copying content or circumventing, then it would be a problem.

Their use of official photos and logos of the blogs without permission is not fair use though, that part will have to go. But they can certainly collect donations for a third party according to any system they want without needing the third party's permission.