Ask HN: Can we add an “Outline” link for paywalls? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can we add an “Outline” link for paywalls?

54 pointsmdrzn17 comments

Since many online newspapers are putting up a paywall, or straight up blocking visitors from EU, I think it's time to consider adding or changing the "web" link that we see here in the comment page. I know that it's used to search on Google for the same article with the intent to bypass the paywall, but time after time it failed me.

I'd personally love to see an "Outline" link which automatically redirects to the uncluttered version of an article using outline.com, which provides a great service. Or otherwise, a Chrome extension that recreate that just for HN.

At the moment I'm using a javascript bookmark, but whenever I visit the WSJ, it has the "GDPR-EU" wall that breaks the URL, so I can't use the bookmark to jump to the Outlined version.

Disclaimer: not affiliated with anyone, just an annoyed EU member.

View on HN

From https://www.outline.com/dmca.html:

> If someone else might own the copyright to it, don't submit it. Outline is for reading pages that:

> 1. you own the rights to,

> 2. is in the public domain,

> 3. constitutes fair use, or

> 4. you have consent of the copyright holder.

> If we find you repeatedly submitting copyrighted content, we will block you from using our service.

As awesome as Outline is, I think HN automatically creating Outline links would eventually become problematic...

I'd say it constitutes as fair use, as it's a modified version, and not just a copy of the original page.

How about changing your javascript bookmarklet to do 'if on news.ycombinator.com, use the url of the first a.storylink'. That way it can be done from the comments page.

I like to use this feature but constantly forgot its name, it was only until i had stumbled upon it in a furiously mal-termed google search that i once again found it and drilled its hyperlink into my brain.

i think that commenters have been pretty good about identifying paywalls and commenting with a link that outlines the doc to provide a succinct representation of the article

also anyone who is not familiar with the way outline works is you just type outline.com/<your-full-http://-link-here> and it generates an outline of the doc.

this is more than just useful for paywall articles i use it all the time to get rid of ads and other annoying stuff when i just want to "read" an article.

Is outline.com entirely legal? Do we have a guarantee similar services will be available if outline.com goes down? Otherwise, de-GDPRizing and depaywallizing functionality is much needed in adblockers, or even a standalone extension.

Any kind of accept-before-read prompt should die a fiery death. They are making life impossible for those of us who browse in anonymous/incongito mode by default. If it's published via HTTP, it's mine to consume the way I choose and simply reading it has no legal implications on my part.

> If it's published via HTTP, it's mine to consume the way I choose and simply reading it has no legal implications on my part.

I don't understand the connection between HTTP and entitlement. Can you explain why you feel that one implies the other?

It's the same type of entitlement that makes me free to listen to anything spoken in a public space. We can debate what is the public space in this case, is it a publicly discoverable or password protected URL etc. - case in which is not really "published", i.e made public. If it's legal for me to download it on my machine, then I should be able to read it and disregard any prompt (or setup my agent to so), it's clearly a non-binding contract.

Outline's servers are not a public space. The idea that discoverability by protocol implies ownership or a grant of license seems faulty.

With respect to Outline's terms, I'm not a lawyer, so I can't speak to whether they're necessarily legally binding. My guess, based on how they're presented, would be 'no'.

I'm not sure you fully understood the problem or that we are speaking about the same thing. Outline.com is a paywall bypass service that republishes original material found on sites like the New York Times. I expect this service to be illegal, I said so myself in the first post. Outline's terms are irrelevant here, they are the ones clearly breaking NYT's terms.

That being said, I went on a tangent and expressed a political preference that any "Click to continue reading and sell your soul" prompt should be non-binding and functionality to bypass them should be added to browsers via extensions.

New York Times servers are not a public space but the Internet is widely recognized as such. A published article trying to force a legal contract as a result of simply downloading and viewing the text, on my private computer, via a public space, should be no more binding than email disclaimers. Again, this is a political position, not legal advice.

is outline ok if it is client side js that grabs the page and rerenders it? is it any different than a chrome extension.

how about if they give me a virtual machine in their datacenter, and i run chrome+client side js, inside my vm?

You could get into Aereo vs American Broadcasting Cos territory if your service made the claim that it dynamically rendered the page for each request, using private instances.

now lets say you mix in some ipfs+cdn? where do you draw the legal, illegal line?

if you really want to get crazy, clients or competing cleanup services (ublock, outline, mercury, instapaper, pocket, user hand cleanup) could compete for the best re-rendering method, one page at a time, and the distributed database of pages+alternateviews could keep track of which "view" is considered the best, for each page.

Sorry if I misunderstood. There's certainly a lot of room for discussion and debate about what terms are binding/enforceable and what aren't. Terms of service and automatic user consent are pretty legally wishy-washy concepts in general.

I understand the argument you're making, but I think it's not all that dissimilar to the argument a person might make about software piracy: that anything discoverable on the Internet becomes, essentially, fair game because it inevitably touches your private device. From a technical perspective, the argument's correct. From a moral/political perspective, I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between the two.

The software analogy is an interesting one. It is generally accepted that software, when ran on a computer, embodies a device or service that is fundamentally different from the same data simply displayed in an editor as computer code. Click-through EULAs are widely recognized and enforced by courts, quite the opposite of email disclaimers.

So in a sense, you do have the right to download any computer code you find on the internet, if legally published by it's author. You can print it out and study it's behavior and the author has no way to restrict that since they themselves published the information. But you typically cannot run it or modify it outside the license terms.

The distinction hinges on the interpretation we give to the data, and I guess that opens a fatal flaw in my argument: while a HTML version of the article constitutes a document that can be downloaded and read regardless of any disclaimers attached, a binary blob that must be run to deobfuscate the text is in effect a program. And since the hallmark of computers is their ability for general programming, it's quite easy for publishers to force you to run a program and accept it's licensing terms before providing the information you seek.

The technical and legal sides to this discussion are interesting, but I think they're really secondary to the moral side.

I think we can both pretty easily agree that paywalls suck. They're a short-term solution to a problem whose long-term solution isn't clear, and they're probably only marginally useful at that. I also think we can agree that the web is a interesting mix of a kind of quasi-public space and privately-owned space, and that means that discussions about what's 'fair' to access and what isn't are a bit nuanced.

Ultimately, though, regardless of the nature of the content — whether it's text, or images, or code — if a publisher pays to produce content and pays to host that content, does that publisher not have some right to control access to that content? The protocols we use to access it are open, and we pay to access at least some of the interconnects responsible for ultimately delivering it to our browsers, but that alone doesn't confer any access rights. HN, for example, could ban any IP address with which your account's been associated, at the server/proxy level, at any time, and without subverting that you'd have no real recourse.

Generally I feel that the existence of piracy suggests that there are merely under-served customers, and I think that applies here also. Publishers should be coming up with better ways to let users pay for content and try to add real value to that. However, being denied access to the Times and so on does not make your life impossible, or even particularly difficult.

Email the admins: hn@ycombinator.com

Training us to do that is exactly how they maintain their control over the community. And it is about control. We’re not allowed to ask for or say anything about HN on HN.

I used to feel how you feel, but after examining the reasons why it’s like this, it’s probably better to get in the habit of asking for things on HN itself. Not only was it like that in the old days, but pg even started an explicit feature requests thread where people could vote on feature priority.

I don’t think something like voting is useful, to be clear. I’m saying that talking publicly about HN is step one in maintaining our own sense of identity as a community.

I'd love to have a conversation with other fellow users, and if everyone agrees on the suggestion I hope mods will just bump this info up to the devs.

You should try the existing Outline chrome extension. After you install it, whenever you go to a paywalled site, all you have to do is click the Outline button in your menubar/taskbar and it takes you to the Outline link for that article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com