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.
>> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
>> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=Are%20payw...
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.
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.
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.