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What is 12ft Ladder?: popular paywall-bypassing back online after takedown

These kind of websites are, unsurprisingly, largely unpopular with news publishers. Richard Reeves, MD at the Association of Online Publishers, has said: "High-quality, responsible journalism costs money, and circumventing paywalls by fraudulent means is an abhorrent act of piracy. The mere fact these ‘paywall bypassing’ sites exist and can gain access to content by masquerading as search engine crawlers is exploitative and, put simply, amounts to theft. This creates a serious dilemma for publishers: search crawlers are necessary for content discovery yet, at the same time, are stealing from the hand that feeds them."

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Tandra Barner

Update: 2024-05-26