To be fair, the archive indeed got heavily abused into simply reading without paywalls. I know this is a controversial opinion, but seeing comments on other threads like “Remember to support news media”, then “use archive to bypass paywalls” then anger towards said companies for caring about getting paid or growing, makes one question where exactly does Lemmy draw the line between pirating and paid content. Or are we simply altogether against sites like 404Media just because of paywalls?
That’s not the point. The point is content scraping (and crawling) is the cornerstone of the contemporary information environment. It’s how we got to this technological paradigm in the first place.
This whole “people are bypassing paywalls” is a badly evidenced non-issue, and all too convenient. What these companies are really saying is “Content scraping is bad when others do it. Only I and other big fish get to do it and profit billions out of it. Fuck ordinary citizens. Fuck everyone and everything but me and my dreams of endless wealth and power.”
You say bypassing paywalls is a non-issue, but it is basically the only thing I have heard people say to use it for on social media. You can have your problems about data harvesting, but don’t pretend like getting around paywalls was not what the average individual user was using it for.
To be fair, the archive indeed got heavily abused into simply reading without paywalls. I know this is a controversial opinion, but seeing comments on other threads like “Remember to support news media”, then “use archive to bypass paywalls” then anger towards said companies for caring about getting paid or growing, makes one question where exactly does Lemmy draw the line between pirating and paid content. Or are we simply altogether against sites like 404Media just because of paywalls?
That’s not the point. The point is content scraping (and crawling) is the cornerstone of the contemporary information environment. It’s how we got to this technological paradigm in the first place.
This whole “people are bypassing paywalls” is a badly evidenced non-issue, and all too convenient. What these companies are really saying is “Content scraping is bad when others do it. Only I and other big fish get to do it and profit billions out of it. Fuck ordinary citizens. Fuck everyone and everything but me and my dreams of endless wealth and power.”
To be fair.
You say bypassing paywalls is a non-issue, but it is basically the only thing I have heard people say to use it for on social media. You can have your problems about data harvesting, but don’t pretend like getting around paywalls was not what the average individual user was using it for.