[panta]

In a way these publishers are abusing a public service (search engines) to get a higher ranking, giving the illusion of publicly available content, but then breaking the promise. In practice for their personal private gain they are damaging the system for everyone else, which is much worse imho.

[picardythird]

Stealing from them just because they are trying to gain search ranking in a shady manner is still stealing. Two wrongs don't make a right.

[ryan_j_naughton]

Please define how this is theft? They are making the article publicly available.

[picardythird]

There aren't making it publicly available. If they made it publicly available there would be no paywall. It just so happens that people can utilize some code to bypass the paywall.