Re:Subscription Hell
by michaeltoth on Sunday May 06, 2018 @01:15PM
(#17007204)
This is a cool idea, but I imagine this isn't legal, right? Creating an actual business out of this would have to require buy-in from the content creators
Re:Subscription Hell
by psherman42 on Sunday May 06, 2018 @01:46PM
(#17007350)
I think it’s funny how everyone is surprised that Silicon Valley hackathon-goers don’t understand or care about copyright. Maybe they’re just “disrupting”!
But, how is this not a flagrant violation of basically everybody's TOS, and illegal in its own right?
Re:Subscription Hell
by matthewmcg on Sunday May 06, 2018 @01:16PM
(#17007209)
What did you plan to do when the publishers terminated your accounts for sharing credentials?
Probably keep making more until the publishers were forced to negotiate. This method is successful. See: Uber.
If it gains sufficient traction and was found to generate equal or more revenue for publishers I could see them willing to come to the table.
The problem I see with bringing publishers to the table is: How do you distribute revenue? Pageviews? That's what you don't want papers to optimize for right now. Equally? Hardly seems fair. Who decides which publishers are on Netscoopx? What ratio of subscribers to paper subscriptions should Netscoopx maintain?
Overall the idea reminds me of Grooveshark and Aereo simultaneously.
Proxy and cache articles using a standard set of credentials from a set list of origin IPs, most likely. The traffic would appear as that of an average reader.
Re:Subscription Hell
by TheCoelacanth on Sunday May 06, 2018 @03:16PM
(#17007887)
That sounds very likely to get you sued for copyright infringement.
We didn't win but it definitely piqued the interest of the crowd and the judges (Sam, Michael, and Adora). We're not pursuing it but hopefully others do.