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Comment by flerovium | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain? Who has purchased the subscription? I'm sure there's a no-redistribution clause in the subscription agreement.

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The person who installed the browser extension would be paying the subscription and ignoring said clause.

But what is the relationship between archive.is and the user who installed the extension?

dude... haha it's a random person on the internet who is doing it for free.

The user helps free the Internet by using archive.is as an openly accessible backup platform.

They (archive.is) would have built the extension to send the current page content to their servers and the user would have installed it so they can archive internet pages. https://help.archive.org/help/save-pages-in-the-wayback-mach... (item 2)

You are confusing archive.is with archive.org. Although archive.is does have an extension[1] it doesn't appear to capture any of the page contents, it just simply sends the url for archive.is to crawl.

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/archive-page/gcaim...

I wasn't exactly confusing them but yeah, I did link to an archive.org article. I was having difficulty finding something specific to archive.is.

I think the distinction between the two is moot in this post. The question could very well have been "How does archive.org bypass paywalls?" Though it's interesting that archive.is seems to just crawl the URL. Indeed that means they wouldn't necessarily be able to bypass the paywall.

curious if eventually companies with start watermarking articles and catch and sue extension users.

I suspect most content publishers would go to the source. If there are people who are already willing to pay for subscriptions and ignore the terms of those subscriptions, it's not much of a stretch that they'll ignore the fact that they got their subscription cancelled once (or twice, or however many times). The publisher would more likely see results taking legal action against the archivist.

It didn't stop the RIAA from suing loads of people over downloading mp3s in the past 2 decades, claiming damages of thousands of dollars per song the individual downloaded.

in this case (archive.is) they have stronger case, since many people who potentially could buy subscription read it on archive.is because extension user violated terms of subscription.

Also, extension likely has also terms of usage prohibiting uploading copyrighted content shifting liability on users.

*uploaded

They went after seeders

downloaders also received legal letters.

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