Don’t like that many of the big, traditional news outlets hide the online editions of their stories behind paywalls? Neither does artist Paolo Cirio, who designed Daily Paywall as a protest against what he sees as an attempt to limit your access to information. The website uses scripting to automatically scoop up articles from The Economist, Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, making the stories available to anyone who visits.
The Daily Paywall is a new website that’s loaded with tens of thousands of pirated articles from some of the world’s top paywalled newspapers, and its proprietor will pay you to read them. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time online knows what it’s like to hit a paywall—you click the link, get a prompt to subscribe for access, perhaps experience a brief pang of disappointment, shrug, and move on your way. Thousands of bits of reportage and information remain sealed off. Since 1997, when the Wall Street Journal became the first major newspaper to block its content from non subscribers, a number of outlets have followed suit in fortifying their walls to protect revenue. Paolo Cirio is trying to knock them down.
