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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

> This does NOT close out of "hard" blockers that require payment to view content because that is illegal.

This implies that "soft" blockers like this aren't illegal, which is a topic of debate and to my knowledge hasn't been legally tested.

I dislike paywalls as much as anyone else, but I wouldn't assume that paywall bypasses are kosher. It's not analogous with ad blocking.

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> which is a topic of debate

No it's not. Nobody is debating this. Even if people were, it's literally impossible to enforce so it doesn't matter (unless your moral conscience is influenced by the law)

Sure, it's neither feasible nor practical to sue individual users for using paywall bypassing tools, but a service with a distinct company presence that could potentially monetize said paywall bypassing would be a probable target for a C&D.

Fair point, will try to make the subscription option give back percentages to the publishers to help them deal with adblocker by letting them claim it. If this is something you're into, lmk!

This is supposed to bypass soft paywalls. Then with a subscription model, you're going to pay back the site that had its soft paywall blocked by your software?

The subscription model is up for debate, would be a way to give peeps a better alternative to having paywalls in the first place as they would induce more traffic loss that way.

"Sorry about the revenue my paid tool took from your website. Here's a pittance, thanks for not suing me."

You can have a debate on anything, but please explain how me closing a popup in my own browser could be illegal? Going around paywall would be unauthorized access, but dismissing popup - either manually or automatically - is not that, since I am clearly authorized to see the content beyond the popup, it being in public and all.

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