My institution subscribes to Nature, and using my library's proxy to access the Nature website, I can use the "Share/bookmark" menu to generate links like http://rdcu.be/bKk4, http://rdcu.be/bKlc, http://rdcu.be/bKld, and http://rdcu.be/bKli, which can be viewed in the browser (or maybe only because I also just installed the ReadCube app?).
The articles linked to above span several months, but it's generating serial links, so I can only assume that it's able to track visits back to the subscriber and/or my university account.
The ReadCube HTML5 reader looks nice, but does not work with JavaScript disabled (no surprise there). It uses JavaScript to override text selection (disabling copy&paste), but after a little meddling with the developer tools and element inspector, you can find a decently near ancestor to the text and copy the DOM as html. Stick that into a new file and you can select (and copy) the text without too much further hassle.
The DOM is awkward and split up kind of like a PDF (selecting a range of text goes haywire in unpredictable cases), but in comparing the HTML DOM hierarchy to the text object structure in the original PDF (which, as a subscriber, I can download), I found no obvious similarities, so I'm guessing they aren't translating the PDF to HTML directly.
1: "$3.99 rent, $9.99 buy" (the was called the "ReadCube access" option)
2: Purchase article full text and PDF: $8 (had no annotations, so presumably the "Nature" option)
In either case this is NOT "free". Nature, try again.
Regarding the creation of the links to read the articles. For me the readcube link is just made from the DOI you get on the public webpage. It is so simple that I even wrote a little bookmarklet to do it: https://betatim.github.io/posts/read-any-nature-paper-for-fr...
A trivial bookmarket or addon could strip their nonsense from the page. The examples you posted were all single page articles, though. Perhaps multiple pages are rendered on demand in a way that would be less trivial to strip.
Yes, I'm convinced that someone is already hacking away at this. Just look at the state of all eBook DRM being currently broken, and that's a much tougher nut to crack (and publishers have much higher financial gains at stake). Also, since no-one else has mentioned it: analog hole.
Do you actually get a pure HTML5 reader on any of your links? For me, each of them requires flash: "To view this page in ReadCube Web Reader ensure that Adobe Flash Player version 10.0.0 or greater is installed."
The articles linked to above span several months, but it's generating serial links, so I can only assume that it's able to track visits back to the subscriber and/or my university account.
The ReadCube HTML5 reader looks nice, but does not work with JavaScript disabled (no surprise there). It uses JavaScript to override text selection (disabling copy&paste), but after a little meddling with the developer tools and element inspector, you can find a decently near ancestor to the text and copy the DOM as html. Stick that into a new file and you can select (and copy) the text without too much further hassle.
The DOM is awkward and split up kind of like a PDF (selecting a range of text goes haywire in unpredictable cases), but in comparing the HTML DOM hierarchy to the text object structure in the original PDF (which, as a subscriber, I can download), I found no obvious similarities, so I'm guessing they aren't translating the PDF to HTML directly.