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HN has a few posts regarding textise.net, but is it legal?

2 points by textman ↗ HN
On an older HN post I discovered Textise.net which lets you enter any web address and puts its text-only content on the textise.net website for viewing.

Seems like blatant copyright infringement, but is it? And if it is, how have they not been shut down? I would think that the major commercial media sites would not like what it is doing.

One of a few past HN posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25840922

4 comments

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ignoranceprior
Is this any worse than a proxy or cache/archival service?
textman
Not really. Wayback machine has been sued for copyright infringement and according to lexisnexis: In its response to the lawsuit, the Internet Archive denies it has violated copyright laws and says its CDL program is fundamentally the same as traditional library lending and is protected by U.S. copyright law's fair use doctrine because it serves the public interest in preservation, access and research.

I would agree with Wayback's statement and what textise is doing is arguably in the public interest; maybe.

LinuxBender
Not sure about legality, but one thing you could test would be if that site obeys robot tags. Add "noarchive,nosnippet" to a pages robot meta tag and see if it will archive it.
textman
They appear to be grabbing the html for a website, stripping out all graphics by removing tags, then inside every anchor href they insert textise.net and pass the original href url as a querystring so they can they fetch that url when you click on a link. Here is what you see when you hover over a link on a recent HN page: https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%3A%2F%2Fb...