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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a suggestion for how WSJ should fund it's journalism?

Maybe copyright infringement isn't an answer to that question.

Please don't do this. There's nothing new to say, so the discussions are tedious and therefore off topic. Also, the question has been decided on HN for many years and is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

No one likes the current solution, it's just that the alternatives would suck worse.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

As a small publisher, strongly disagree with your stance. I regularly find articles of ours that have been re-published years ago without our consent. Unfortunately, the time it takes to file DMCA complaints is onerous, and this is for our relatively small publication. Despite attempts to deal with this, I still find republished articles that have been around for years. These republished articles do cause actual harm to our business, as they sometimes rank higher in search engine results than the original article.

Larger publications, such as the WSJ would probably need several people working full time to deal with this situation, and still fail at catching many instances of infringement. In the case of an infringing article appearing on the front page of HN, that infringement leads to widespread unauthorized distribution.

You wrote in a different comment "HN would suck worse without NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc."

That argument is effectively: It is better to allow infringement, because the articles are worth reading.

Just because something is worth stealing does not mean it should be stolen.

Maybe if HN wants to contribute to supporting journalism – or at least finding a solution to the "problem" – you'll allow the "pain" of not supporting copyright infringement. Pain, after all, can be motivating.

No one will feel that “pain” except submitters. No one is not going to sub to WSJ because they can just lurk around on HN until the article they want to read is posted. That just doesn’t make sense.

Maybe it is copyright infringement, maybe it’s fair use. Either way it is unsurprising. When I got the physical paper it was easy to share it with a coworker (I just handed him the newspaper) or I taped it up in the office kitchen to show everyone, or I clipped an article and sent it to a friend (you know in an envelope with a stamp,) If it was time sensitive I could call someone and tell the to buy today’s paper... They didn’t have to subscribe to read one day’s paper, much less a single article. *For the record, I’m a paid WSJ subscriber.

As a former wsj subscriber I wish I could pay a la cart for the article. Perhaps $1-2?

$37/month is high for a news source I usually read less than 5 articles per month. I already pay for Bloomberg/Economist/NYT/New Yorker but that’s because I regularly read double digit number of articles from them per month.

At the same time when social media (like hn) sends me to wsj I would gladly contribute proportionally to my utilization.

So you'd pay $2/article, and read about 5 a month. That's $10/month.

You can actually effectively kind of do that by getting an Apple News+ subscription. That's $10/month and includes WSJ articles.

If you are reading on an iPad or iPhone and see a WSJ link on HN, hit Safari's share icon, and select News and it opens in the News app.

I didn't know about this, I'll give it a go! Thanks!

Edit: this is kind of interesting. I looked at Bloomberg and a few others and the subscriptions were comparable to their normal digital options. But WSJ is much cheaper on Apple News, why is this so? Is there some catch (like 2nd year is expensive)?

> But WSJ is much cheaper on Apple News, why is this so? Is there some catch (like 2nd year is expensive)?

I have no idea. I mostly got a News+ subscription for the magazines. It has Scientific American, Consumer Reports, National Geographic, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian, Wired, some Mac, Windows, and Linux magazines, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Readers Digest, The New Republic, National Review, The Advocate, and a whole bunch more in a whole bunch of categories.

I only regularly read a few of those, which is enough on its own to justify the subscription. Having all the rest there for when I occasionally want something different is a nice bonus.

This was recently justified to me in an interesting way. Back in the heyday of print newspapers, you had your subscribers, who had the paper delivered every day. Then you had your casual readers who would pick it up at a newsstand if they saw an interesting article.

And then you had your "freeloaders" -- the people who would read the paper at the library or fish it out of the trash or would ask to borrow it from the person on train next to them.

These links are basically for the freeloaders who would never have paid anyway.

Interestingly enough, most US libraries actually offer way to read these things for free by going through the library website, it's just not as easy as using an archive link.

This is where Brave had a good idea with their micropayments to content providers [1], based on the sites you visited.

You may not agree with their execution, and I don't think it will ever work, but I wish it did.

* [1] https://creators.brave.com/

It will only be a matter of time before sites like Washington Post detect a Brave user and ask for instant transfer of BAT for access.

Although Brave uses Chrome's UA, I think we can ask Brave for it's actual UA - https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/8216

I give WashP as an example because they are extremely anti adblock and most subscribers see ads too. They also have very hard ways to opt out of third party tracking.

This is not the point of this article sent. If you want to start a discussion about funding newspapers make a new thread.

Don't hijack this one.

Please check "Are paywalls ok?" at hacker news [FAQ](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

Also, previous discussion about WSJ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938

Fox News ought to provide ample funding

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