There was someone who was with the WBC on Reddit doing an IAMA earlier. According to him, this is just a myth. These people really do believe it what they are preaching. They don't even earn that much from suing people.
There's no free trial from the site but I've just created the voucher code HNTRIAL which should give the first 50 Hacker News readers a two month free trial. Enjoy!
Thanks - no plans to start charging as I essentially want it to grow into a community-based search engine.
Largely a proof of concept for now, maybe one day in the future might charge for indexing of private bookmarks, PDFs, etc, but those features aren't currently implemented due to technical complexity.
On a related note I'm interested to see how www.lumi.do does as this is one of the future feature possibilities I was thinking of for bkmrx...