Is It Legal to Bypass a Paywall? What You Should Know
Reading a paywalled article through a reader tool sits in a grey area of terms of service rather than criminal law. Here is a plain-English look at the legal and ethical questions.
Paywall behaviour last tested
"Is this legal?" is the most common question we get, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a shrug. This article explains how reader tools like Skip the Paywall actually work, where the legal questions arise, and how to think about the ethics. It is general information, not legal advice; laws differ by country and you should consult a lawyer if you have a specific concern.
What a reader tool actually does
Skip the Paywall does not break into anything. When you paste a link, it requests the public web page from the publisher's server, in the same way a search engine crawler does, then extracts the article text with an open-source readability parser and shows it to you in a clean layout. It has no subscriber accounts, no stolen credentials and no access to anything the publisher's server does not voluntarily send.
That last point is why it works on some sites and not others. On a metered paywall, the publisher sends the full article to everyone and hides it with a script in the browser. On a hard paywall, the publisher never sends the text to non-subscribers, and the tool cannot show what it never received. The tool reads what is served; it does not circumvent authentication.
The legal picture in general terms
Computer misuse and hacking laws
Laws such as the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the UK Computer Misuse Act are aimed at unauthorised access to computer systems. Courts in the United States have increasingly held that accessing publicly available web pages, even against a site's wishes, is not "unauthorised access" in the criminal sense, most notably in the hiQ v. LinkedIn litigation and in the Supreme Court's narrowing of the CFAA in Van Buren v. United States. Requesting a page the server is willing to send to any visitor is a long way from hacking.
Copyright
Publishers own the copyright in their articles. Reading an article does not infringe copyright; copying and redistributing it can. A reader tool displays the article to the one person who requested it and does not store or republish it, which is functionally similar to a browser's reader mode. Sharing screenshots of full articles, reposting the text, or building a public archive would be a different matter.
Terms of service
This is where the real grey area lies. Most publishers' terms prohibit circumventing access restrictions or using automated tools to access their content. Breaching terms of service is generally a contractual matter rather than a crime, and the practical consequence, if any, is that the publisher can block your access. It is worth being honest that using a reader tool may well be against the terms of the site you are reading.
Anti-circumvention rules
Laws such as the DMCA in the US prohibit circumventing "technological protection measures" that control access to copyrighted works. Whether a JavaScript meter that hides text already sent to your browser counts as such a measure is a genuinely unsettled question. There is a reasonable argument that it does not, since the work is delivered unprotected, but it has not been squarely decided in the context of news paywalls.
The ethical question
Legality is one thing; whether you should is another. Journalism costs money, and paywalls exist because advertising alone no longer pays for newsrooms. Our view, which we state on every page of this site, is that a reader tool is reasonable for the occasional article a friend sends you or a story you need to fact-check, and unreasonable as a permanent substitute for subscribing to a publication you read every day.
A few practical suggestions:
- If you read a title more than a few times a month, look at its subscription offers. Introductory prices for The Times, The New Yorker and most others are low.
- Support individual writers directly where a platform allows it. On Medium, authors are paid by member reading time, which a reader tool does not generate.
- Do not republish articles you have read through a reader. Link to the original instead.
Where Skip the Paywall draws the line
We do not use subscriber credentials, we do not store articles, and we block search engines from indexing the reader pages so that we never compete with the original for traffic. Reader pages are generated on demand for a single visitor and discarded. We also link every article back to its source. Those are the limits we think a tool like this should respect, and we would rather be transparent about them than pretend the question does not exist.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from The New Yorker and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
Can I get in trouble for using a paywall reader?
Using a reader that requests a publicly served page is very unlikely to be a criminal matter in most countries. It may breach the publisher’s terms of service, which is a contractual issue, and the usual consequence is that the site can block you. This is general information, not legal advice.
Does Skip the Paywall use hacked or shared subscriber accounts?
No. It fetches the public page the same way a search engine crawler does and extracts the text. It cannot retrieve anything the publisher does not send to non-subscribers, which is why it fails on hard paywalls.
Is it legal to share an article I read through the reader?
Sharing the link to the original article is fine. Copying the full text and posting it elsewhere is a copyright issue regardless of how you read it. Link rather than repost.