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Comment by dsnr | Hacker News Reader

> one that doesn't hijack 50% of search results that are hidden behind a forced login

Recently Medium started to do the same thing. Google should start penalizing such results.

I always take screenshots of Pinterest images. They want to make it hard to save the pinterest image that you see on google search results. They want you to sign up. Haha. Well I guess they haven’t heard of screenshots before.

Irony being that wirthout the clickthrough and attribution, Pinterest is essentially a copyright pirating site.

I've been wondering about that actually. How do they get away with it when they are essentially just profitting off of other people's images

Because they “are just the platform”, and the early days was all about “make your own boards for your own purposes”. Once they had enough users they quickly transitioned to what we see now: game Google search results and force people to sign up.

The DMCA makes this sort of misbehavior legal. It’s a terrible law.

Without it, we also wouldn’t have YouTube, which would be a net win in my book.

What? It's illegal under the DMCA to do the shit that Pinterest/9gag/ifunny/etc. does, it's just that no one has the legal recource (i.e. lots of money) to do anything about it, save the massive rent-seeking entities like the RIAA. All the uploads of music albums by random users still exist on YouTube, but any ad revenue goes straight to the copyright holders.

The DMCA provides the platform with legal immunity as long as they honor takedown requests.

So, individuals are guilty until proven innocent, and platforms siphon money off the piracy. The government gets a single choke point for censorship.

A good way to extract original images in Firefox is ctrl+i -> the Media tab. There you should be able to download. Although some particularly hostile/fancy with their code sites have a way of breaking even that. Good thing we still have screenshots in modern computing.

It's against google rules to show different content to their crawler and the end user (images for the crawler, login for the user).

I‘m guessing players like Medium work around the rules by allowing X number of free (as in not logged-in) views. So it works if you open the link in private mode. But search engines could have the bot retry requests to check the website‘s honesty.

> But search engines could have the bot retry requests to check the website‘s honesty.

A simpler solution to this is just having a human check it.

Humans are expensive.

What I hate about Medium is that I don’t know whether I’m clicking a premium article or not on Google results.

If it’s a premium article that I don’t want to read or not what I’m looking for, I’ve wasted one of three of their free premium articles a month.

Since I’m not a paying member, I will have wait another month to read a premium article that I like, if I used up my free 3 articles.

Google should find and add a way to let me know that I’m clicking a paywall link, or don’t index them, so I’m able to avoid them

Just block their JavaScript and read to your hearts content.

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