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Re:Subscription Hell by dopeboy on Sunday May 06, 2018 @01:11PM (#17007175)
Me and three friends worked on a similar idea at the YC hackathon a couple weeks ago. You'd pay us $10/month and we'd buy a lot of subscriptions to different newspapers. You'd install our chrome extension and when you came across a paywall, we'd autofill credentials that are just valid for one day.

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.

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”!
Re:Subscription Hell by blahedo on Sunday May 06, 2018 @01:19PM (#17007228)
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?
Re:Subscription Hell by rocky1138 on Sunday May 06, 2018 @02:43PM (#17007671)
Probably keep making more until the publishers were forced to negotiate. This method is successful. See: Uber.
Re:Subscription Hell by jogjayr on Sunday May 06, 2018 @04:03PM (#17008201)
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.

Re:Subscription Hell by jstarfish on Sunday May 06, 2018 @02:46PM (#17007689)
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.
Re:Subscription Hell by djsumdog on Sunday May 06, 2018 @09:12PM (#17009699)
Or just provide a front end for caching via archive.is and other archive sites?