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Comment by brtkdotse | Hacker News Reader

I’d like something like this, but instead of bypassing the paywalls and stealing the articles it’d pay a few cents for each article and charge me at the end of the month.

I really, really want to pay but I really, really don’t want to set up a subscription to read a one-off article.

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You are not stealing anything, unless you find a way to delete the source article after you downloaded it. It might break copyright rules. I wouldn't recommend doing either though.

Hmm, I think the victims of organized corporate espionage might see this completely different. Its totally enough if "agents" of a certain country known for not really caring about copyright copy the plans for your new product. They dont have to delete yoour original plans to do damage.

The damage is different. In actual historical stealing use of the item is a zero sum game soof you take it you deprive use of the item to the person deemed the rightful owner (no comment or judgemebt on how that deeming happened for the purpose of this comment). This is breech of contract. It is not a zero sum game. There is no deprivation of use for the person deemed the owner. Instead there is an ambiguous effect on revenue because you followed the natural market outcome for information and distributed it freely. Maybe you decreased revenue potential because the person would have otherwise paid, maybe the person would have otherwise gone without the information so no revenue effect but deadweight loss to society of that person acting in a less informed way, maybe you increased revenue because the one freebie caused a purchase that otherwise wouldn't have happened. It is situation dependent but in any situation it is not correct to call this stealing despite the marketing efforts of copyright owners to get it mislabelled as such.

Blendle used to provide it, but alas, no more:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

I'm sure there was a startup a few years ago trying to achieve this. I can't recall the name sadly, it was 10+ years ago. Agar or something perhaps?

I believe you topped up a balance and if the site supported it could access per-article resouces for a one off fee. For this to really work it needs to be site independant however.

Nobody's every been prepared to try microtransactions that are actually micro.

I'd like a browser addon that warns of paywalled links before I click them, perhaps adds a padlock icon or dollar sign (maybe with required subscription/cost on hover), to avoid nonsense like 'the first paragraph or two is free, then you hit the paywall'.

Even better if it can do the same for region-locked sites and adblocker-blocking sites, or if on mobile, sites that nag/force you to use apps instead of the web...

I thought the Brave browser would provide such a solution. I was very disappointed to find out it's not an intended use case.

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