By Gary Spurgeon
Publisher

Those of us in the newspaper business don’t think or talk a lot about having our product stolen nor do we worry about it a lot. In more than 40 years of going to newspaper conventions and seminars, I don’t think I’ve ever been involved in a conversation that concerned shoplifting or petty theft losses.

People in the news business may occasionally mention the word theft, but most of the time it involves someone pirating a news story—something that now happens on the Internet with some regularity.

Actual theft of our product doesn’t happen a lot, but, unfortunately, it does happen. With our newspapers being sold for $1 per copy, that’s more than the cost of some food items like candy and gum that often disappear from convenience stores and other outlets.

Shoplifting, however, is serious business. For some local businesses it can total thousands of dollars per year. Whatever the cost, wherever it happens, honest people pay for it. Shoplifting is a cost of business that invariably ends up in the cost of products we purchase.

Newspapers sell papers in racks or machines that make theft easy. When they are in open racks, “forgetting” to pay is easy to do. Machines require, in our case, $1 to get inside, but there’s really no limit as to how many papers you can take for that $1. We know that it happens when the money collected doesn’t equal the number of papers that have been taken from the machine.

In recent months, one local thief has been going further than just getting a second paper for a friend. He gets three or four at a time. How do we know? We’ve observed him and others have observed him. We would suspect that he’s “getting” those papers for others, but failing to give us the money they pay him for his good delivery deed.

Why don’t we report it to the police? We’ve mentioned it, but what do you do with someone that steals newspapers worth as little as $3 or $4 per week? No judge is going to put him jail—probably not even fine him either.

Another form of thievery, as far as we are concerned, are those who subscribe to our electronic edition and then pass on their username and password to others so they can have access without paying. The software we use alerts us to situations where it appears this is happening. The software calls it “abuse.”

Many people, when sharing their password or username, are going to justify their actions by asking, “Who is going to know” The answer is, “Our software.”

What they don’t understand fully is that each time someone logs into our E-Edition site, their computer’s IP number (each computer has a different number, is recorded and saved along with the username. If someone logs in using that username, a different IP number is associated with the username.

Obviously, some people have more than one computer, so it’s not unusual for different IP numbers to show up with the same username. However, the software takes that into account with an arbitrary threshold. Once the threshold is exceeded, the software dutifully reports “possible abuse.”

It’s next to impossible to easily trace IP numbers to a name, but obviously we can, from our records, trace a username to a real name. We have a few usernames associated with 10-15 IP numbers every week. One username has reached as many as 25 IP numbers. What would you conclude?

Our e-edition is intended for subscribers and no more than those people living in their immediate household. It’s not intended for a son in college, a daughter half-way across the country, or Uncle Joe down in Florida. We think those people ought to buy their own subscriptions.

There was a time when we sold as many as 50 student subscriptions to local students attending college. We now have only a few or none at all. We suspect that today’s college kids would rather read the E-Edition so their parents provide them with a username and password that is free to print subscribers. There’s not much we can do about it, and you could argue there’s nothing wrong with that. It still, however, lessens our income and makes our newspaper a bit more costly for the rest of our subscribers.

Some, we suspect, have had their usernames and passwords pirated in some way. All of us need to take better care of our passwords. Having an unauthorized person read our newspaper may not be a big deal, but access to bank accounts, credit card accounts and many other things can have very serious consequences.

We understand that by charging for access, using usernames and passwords, we are inviting this kind of abuse. Our only recourse is to cut off privileges, but most of the time we view that as more hassle than we want.

Yet, we are dismayed to find out that people we thought were honest, ethical, and upstanding have shared usernames and passwords with multiple people. They are allowing some people free access when the rest of you pay.

In some ways, we consider it a compliment. If people are willing to compromise their ethics and warp their conscience to get free access or a free copy of what we publish, then it must be a good product and one that people want to read.

Still, it’s hard not to feel these few are taking advantage of us.