Maybe it is? Idk, I'm no ethicist so I wouldn't be able to justify it. But is it any different than using the web link to get a google redirect when you didn't really come from google? Or using incognito mode? Perhaps the better discussion is about how a community forum handles articles which only a subset of people can access.

It's one thing to find a loophole in their paywall to view their content on their site. It seems to me that it's quite another to scrape their content and serve it up somewhere else in its entirety.

I don't see how a loophole is substantively different than this approach.

Outline is just the new readability. I'm not sure they're even aware that they're serving paywalled content. To me, the end user, the effect is the same. They're both just loopholes.

My question is: How are they even doing it? WSJ doesn't even vend the entire article from the server if the user is not inside their paywall.

How is it "stealing"?

I'm not here to defend it, but as a paying digital subscriber to WSJ (and other papers), this link is useful! WSJ signed me out (they often do), and to sign in again I have to re-enable JavaScript which means their site gets slower and the text bounces all over as things load. I'm happy to pay for quality content but news sites have to stop degrading the digital experience if they want me to keep forking over $30/month.

Edit: for science, I enabled JavaScript and loaded the WSJ page with a cold cache. The text jumped 3 times over the 22 seconds it took to fully load the page.

All I want from these pay-walls is a instapaper-like experience, and that you cannot get that for $30? With $30 I can buy 130 kid's polio vaccines.

Right? It doesn't seem like too much to ask for.

People often confuse copyright infringement with theft, also thank to the silly Hollywood scare ads.

I admittedly used 'stealing' as a shorthand for copyright infringement so I'll rephrase: How is it not copyright infringement?