CMV: The cost of sharing paywalled content should fall on the publisher, not the person sharing it

I am a NYT web subscriber. They offer "gift" articles. I find their content to be high quality, but in order to access a majority of it, you have to be a subscriber. Great. I'm their guy.

However, they also require people who access the "gift" articles to sign up via email to their site. I find that to be both disingenuous and a failure of quality. They could bring good articles to the forefront, request a sign-up/subscription, and then allow access. Providing existing subscribers with the ability to gift an article to others and then use it as a mechanism to harvest email addresses is hurting the subscriber that sends the link, particularly those on social media.

The fact that this is a thing and, further, that this is something that most socially-media-aware companies leverage is a problem with social media as a whole. Bring the cost back to the provider, not to the promoter of said content.