Does anyone else get rubbed the wrong way by this sort of irreverent infringement? Even if you have zero concern for journalists’ copyrights, it puts this forum at risk.
Fair use exemption makes specific reference to "purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting" - those are just the first three listed, and all three apply to a HN post.
This is a gross misrepresentation of fair use doctrine. Fair use requires a "transformation" of the work. It does not permit reproducing a work in its entirety without permission just so you can have a discussion about it.
If it put the forum at risk, they wouldn’t put the “web” link after the title of the post, which basically accomplishes the same thing. This kind of thing is officially sanctioned.
Websites like WSJ manage to get listed high in the Google rankings by presenting the actual article, instead of a paywall, to the Googlebot and to requests with Google in the Referer field (as I understand it). I gather that they do the same thing to the Archive scraper. As far as I'm concerned, that's a cheap trick the website performs, and using a cheap trick to get around it seems fine to me.
The other way of looking at it is that it can boost publication revenue and journalist income by driving more traffic to the publication than it would otherwise get, of which some may convert to subscriptions (if the publication can offer sufficient incentive).
Obviously, no user would be able to justify buying subscriptions to every publication linked from HN.
And if there was no paywall bypass, then HN couldn't link to it and it would get no HN traffic and no discussion on HN at all.
Allowing paywall bypass means the publication gets the HN traffic and discussion it wouldn't otherwise get, and the possibility of converting some of that traffic to subscribers who wouldn't otherwise subscribe.
For what it's worth, the owners/operators clearly don't think it puts this forum at risk, as the sharing of paywall bypass links is explicitly allowed/encouraged according to the guidelines and moderator comments.
And the very fact that the publications themselves allow bypass via certain referrers (e.g., Facebook) suggests they don't have a problem with it.
While I think posting paywalled links is basically advertisements and I therefore have no problem with people posting accessible versions, I am curious about the same question. I think the question about the legality is legit and shouldn't be downvoted (unless I'm misinterpreting the guidelines). Not sure I'll like the answer and potential new rule, though.
