[czarit]

Guessing from the interface it exposes, BPC seems to work by making a ruleset matching sites with a battery of possible changes, including resetting cookies (to reset freebie-counters), fetching from Google cache, disabling javascript (for purely client-side paywalls) and by finding exceptions for the paywall (user-agent, referer, IP).

The last one is probably the one that is closest to being a breach of some law. If the plugin did not ship with rules for a lot of sites, it would probably be considered harmless, but shipping a list of the magic user-agents etc. that circumvents paywalls seems risky, legality-wise.

[bee_rider]

Although, it seems really weird, user-agents are generally thought of as an authentication mechanism, right?

I’m 0% sympathetic to sites that for which this works. The reason they accept these user agents is to mislead Google, right? I think it is fine for a site to not send content to me if I have ads or JavaScript disabled, or if I don’t have a subscription. But it is wrong to falsely advertise that the content is available.

For some reason I assumed this had some automatic archive integration or something like that—actually circumventing real account mechanisms by copying out the content to some third party host. Because otherwise, taking them down seems pretty dumb. But then, I should not have assumed, the world is a pretty dumb place.