I was seeing an argument on a different board about someone who would take every copy of a certain free newspaper from its stand and throw them all out because he thinks the paper is stupid. His justification is basically, “it says ‘FREE’; I can do whatever I want with it.”
Is there anything legally wrong with doing that?
It may be possible to be prosecuted for doing this. See this page from the Student Press Law Center and follow the link to cases where people (including the mayor of Berkeley California last year) were prosecuted for this.
I’m pretty sure the Chicago Reader is just such a paper (free; not stupid).
Not that this adds anything to the thread…
I don’t know how widespread it is but when I was working for one free paper there was a notice that taking more than one copy was theft. But then other free papers I worked for didn’t have that notice.
So there you go.
We have a free paper around Dallas called The Observer. I haven’t looked at it lately, but I remember it says “The first copy is free. Each additional copy is 50 cents” or something like that. This could be a way to prevent people from doing just that.