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One thing that seems to be going unconsidered in the current discussion is that newspapers rely on advertising revenues as their primary income, not the newsstand price.
From that perspective, they want their circulation/distribution to be as wide as possible, but they need some way to demonstrate to their advertisers that they really are reaching X number of people, and therefore an ad in their publication should cost Y amount of money.
Papers have pretty much always been instruments of the Public Record, and as such they, historically, have never even tried to stop secondary distribution, short of outright plagiarism, of course.
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