Blocking the Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, Only Erase the Web's History

eff.org

10 pointsrbanffy5 comments

Newspapers of record blocking the Internet Archive is really unfortunate, and kind of scary for the future.

> The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. […] There’s a strong case that such training is fair use.

I find it very interesting that the EFF is taking a stance (especially this stance!) on this topic.

Here [1] is more detail about EFF's stance regarding AI training and fair use. (I found it by searching for site:eff.org ai training fair use .)

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/us-copyright-offices-d...

NYT wants to block them because they don't want to be held accountable for spewing Trumps propaganda. If you are truly locking it down, just only make your news accessible via login.

The NYT already has a very strict paywall, so there's not really a point in blocking the Internet Archive. Things are very different for The Guardian though, since it has absolutely no paywall on the web.

NYT's paywall is softer than FT's or WSJ's - just deleting domain cookies is enough to bypass.

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