As you may recall, the New York Times is now charging half a c-note per year for special web access that incudes their opinion columnists. As you may also recall, I was curious to see how "available" they'd be to folks who hadn't subscribed, and I was using Frank Rich's weekend column as a test case.
A couple of weblogs posted it, and I assume the Times will let them know they shouldn't do that. It was also posted to a few newsgroups. The Times will have a hard time stopping that but it's also not a reliable source. To find a "real" website that makes the Frank Rich column available for free, one has to go all the way to Taiwan.
So I don't know what to do about my trial subscription. If these columns had been wholly unavailable, the choice would be easy. If a number of reliable, established sites had posted them, the choice would also be easy and in the other direction. Instead, it's somewhere in-between. I have until 10/4 to decide.