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Comment by jey | Hacker News Reader

Via outline.com: https://outline.com/VY5L3z

While I love the utility of it, how the hell is that website legal? It’s stated purpose is to violate copyright law?!

From the page trailer:

> Outline is a free service that makes websites more readable. We remove the clutter, like ads, related links, and comments—so you can read comfortably.

I doubt it’s legs but it’s useful so it’ll get traction and then get sued.

It's not the only service that does this. Even browsers have out of the box support for some of them.

Browsers don’t redistribute the content. That’s a crucial difference, much like you can video tape a broadcast and fast forward through the ads at home, but not if you run a pub.

I haven't looked at the code, but maybe this site doesn't redistribute anything, either.

And just because something's executing on the server side, that really shouldn't necessarily change the legality of it. (Hell, maybe Safari or Chrome look like they're doing it locally and tunnel data through a cache server.)

They have a convoluted dmca take down process, which is described here and may keep them in clear?: https://www.outline.com/dmca.html

From the latency, it looks like it doesn't cache. So it's literally transformative. If that matters, I don't know.

Where did this "editing a copy makes it transformative" meme come from? Legally, transformative means "created a substantially new work" not "mechanically applied a style change that preserves all of the original content and its original value"

By that logic adblock, readable mode, applying your own css and making the text bigger with cmd-+ is 'copyright' infringement since every modification is modifying some copy in memory.

It's a bunch of legal laymen conjecturing on legal issues.

I always wonder: how are journalists supposed to get paid when people steal their content?

"Real journlaists do it for the love of their art."

They do it for exposure.

To bring up an old meme....

1. Journalists get exposure

2. ???

3. Profit.

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