Ask HN: How can archive.is access paid online articles?

2 pointshamburgererror3mo ago2 comments

On many HN submissions about paid articles I have noticed that some users post a link of the paid article freely accessible on archive.is.

Some examples from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46324623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46320372

Do the users who do that have a paid subscription to the journals? How is archive.is able to access the content? Isn't there legal issues?

2 comments

myyke3mo ago

There seem to be issues indeed:

On October 30, 2025, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) subpoenaed Archive.today's domain registrar, Tucows. The subpoena stated its purpose is to identify the owner(s) of the archive.today domain name, and that it was part of a criminal investigation conducted by the FBI, the nature of which was not disclosed.[8][9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today

treesknees3mo ago

I can’t speak directly about how they do it for The NY Times, but at least in the past there were a few methods.

On some websites the paywall is only client-side. By capturing the contents of the page and removing the client-side banner, you can access content.

There are also some that allow specific user agents, such as those used by search engine crawlers, so that the entire contents becomes indexed.

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