Thread

An update on Wayback Machine access

685 points · 362 comments · ChrisArchitect

Onavo · 1789496823 · focus · HN ↗
Why not just offer a paid endpoint for the crawlers? It's not like the demand is going to go away anytime soon.
It serves nobody except CloudFlare and hardware companies when one side set up blockers and the other side spend money putting VPN SDKs in consumer TVs.
I am also curious how the (Russian?) paywall bypass mirror archive.is is doing given that they are probably subject to similar amounts of traffic.
1. croes · 1789496941 · focus · HN ↗
  It’s one thing to archive other companies content, it’s another to sell the access to it
  1. Onavo · 1789497048 · focus · HN ↗
    That's for the lawyers to sort out, they have a lot of flexibility as a US nonprofit. The case law isn't that clear cut for this.
    simonw · 1789497140 · focus · HN ↗
    Internet Archive was almost destroyed by a copyright lawsuit from book publishers within the last few years. I expect they aren't excited to take on any additional risk of similar lawsuits right now.
    quotemstr · 1789507147 · focus · HN ↗
    They brought it on themselves by marketing a read-for-free product

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