What do you mean? I was always under the impression that archives are for accessing a copy when the original is hard to access - this seems like the perfect use case.
Bypassing a paywall does sound a bit like piracy, if you think about it. This is what the commenter is referring to (tho in this case, I don't see a paywall on the article this end.)
Advertisements and web tracking feel like stalking. I’ll pay for content when the content providers respect my attention and privacy and not until then.
This isn't archive.org. Archive.is (and its many TLD equivalents) is explicitly for bypassing paywalls like this, and this is absolutely the intended use.
9 times out of ten it's because sites use cloaking and serve up all of the contents to search bots, but then paywall out end users, so it's kind of a hoisted by their own petard kind of situation.
And, I mean, people can choose to not follow those links. To the rest of us they're often very welcome, and we aren't subscribing to every random site for the once in a millennia worthwhile article.
The site existed for most of a decade before it had any particular paywall bypassing. It's an ondemand archival site that saves the DOM in such a way that redisplay is faithful, unlike archive.org.
It's a key resource in court cases for purely archival purposes and the fact that it bypasses paywalls is essential for its archival purpose to function.
Yeah, sure (sarcastic). And people mostly use torrents to share Linux distros.
The site/org has no office and is anonymously run virtually. Exists on random, essentially free for all TLDs, does not honour take-down requests, does not respect robots.txt, masquerades as the Googlebot...
...yeah, I happen to have not been born yesterday so I'm not going to play along with a fiction.
Nothing I said was rude or adversarial, so not sure why you decided to be rude and adversarial here.
My sarcasm was to the purported original goal, when it has always, since day one, been a fake Googlebot known, again since day 1, as a circumvention of paywalls for sites that cloak.
When giant IP corporations violate IP, that's very different from Joe Rando watching a movie for free. It's way worse, on multiple levels, for rule-makers to break rules than for ordinary people to.
> It's way worse, on multiple levels, for rule-makers to break rules than for ordinary people to.
The purpose of the system is what it does. Yet the system routinely persecutes ordinary people for this criminal offense while giant IP corporations just treat it as an opening move in corporate deal-making.