Ah, don't you just love it when there's a simple technical problem with a simple and valid technical solution, but there's a legal problem that stops it dead?

Well, legal and whatever domain the "you viewed the ads but they werent tracked so we don't get money" problem falls into. Stupid artificial barriers which are there because they solve an economic problem, that wouldn't exist in a perfect world. Game theory, maybe.

This reminds me of the bird complaining: "if only there was no air slowing me down, I would fly a lot faster".

I have the technical ability to steal lots of stuff. But yes, there are legal (and moral) obstacles that keep me from doing it.

The solution described above is pretty much what Google's AMP does. It turns out that a lot of people don't like AMP because they see it as a monopolistic way of keeping users in Google's walled garden. HN doesn't quite have a monopoly on startup/tech news, but I think the same reasons apply.

Sites opt-in to AMP, so copyright is less of an issue there.

You'd be OK with putting a ton of work into something, and then having it cached/ripoffed somewhere else?

Google and the Internet Archive already caches it. Also, if your work goes down for whatever (perhaps legal) reason, you know that people can still benefit from it.

Caching it for when a site is overloaded is not ripping it off, just like sending copies of works to the British Library for archival purposes is not ripping the original work off.

The trick in this solution is deciding when to flip the switch for the cached version.

Perhaps a simple GET to the URL ever 60s. If you receive 5 non-200 responses in a row, then the HN link points to the archive.is version. Same method in reverse for bringing it back.

That sounds like it would DDoS the site. Even better: monitor the comments for "site is down", or just provide a link to google's cached version as a button (Even better than the 'web' link we have at the moment).

> That sounds like it would DDoS the site

How would one request per minute from a single server DoS the site, let alone DDoS it?

Both of those sites can be instructed not to store copies of your pages for their caches or archives; and they will dutifully follow your instructions.

Also, the library analogy doesn't work in copyright law. Copyright protects the act of copying, not the act of transferring an already-authorized copy of a work to someone else.

Could we pull up the real page from the actual domain in a full-window iframe and then replace it with the cached version if it fails to load?

That will fail for a lot of websites since X-Frame-Options is becoming more common: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-...