After being shut down in 2014 for allegations of copyright infringement, Daily Paywall is up and running again, reports The Creators Project. On a safe new server, Daily Paywall has published more than 60,000 articles from 2014, originally published by media outlets like the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Economist.

Daily Paywall also prints a free newspaper distributed in New York City. Shortly after Daily Paywall’s December 2014 launch, Daily Paywall came tumbling down under a legal threat from Pearson PLC, who previously owned the Financial Times and The Economist, over copyright violations.

Daily Paywall was created by conceptual artist Paolo Cirio in 2014 to fight for-profit media. Cirio subscribed to targeted news source, and created a script to pull entire articles from those paywalled sites. He reposted those articles on his site, including accompanying images and graphics, and edited and published a few of his own. The goal? To combat the “for-profit scheme of information selling and consumption.”

Cirio’s site and newspaper are free, but he utilizes a “social business plan” to fund the project. Under this plan, readers can earn $1 for responding correctly to a quiz after particular articles, journalists can earn money from reader donations for their work, and readers can support the project itself with monetary donations.

“A functional democracy needs an informed public. However, today access to knowledge is controlled by a for-profit industry, while information is manipulated in its distribution and organization to maintain undemocratic orders. Daily Paywall proposes a provocative and conceptual economic model for the media and publishing industry. With Daily Paywall the for-profit scheme of information selling and consumption is reversed for democratic and educational purposes, by paying readers to access and understand the news, while directly rewarding critical content creators by sidestepping the interfering middleman’s agenda,” wrote Cirio on Daily Paywall.

The Creators Project talked to Cirio about the relaunch of the site:

“Currently, Daily Paywall offers news articles that are a year old,” Cirio said. “It would be a shame if the publishers will be so greedy to take it down again. At this point, the project serves as an archive in a public library, [allowing] anyone to look back in history.”

Though some might consider Cirio a hacker, The Creators Project said Cirio “resists the term.” He sees himself more as a commentator on social processes and fighting for public access to information he believes should be free.

In a recorded presentation on the Daily Paywall project available on YouTube, Cirio admits his theft:

“I was basically stealing every single article news (sic) that the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and The Economist were publishing every day, every hour actually…I collected 60,000 pay-per-view articles.”

Insider Take:

Whether you believe Cirio to be a political activist or a hacker, he admits to stealing articles from some of the world’s top financial news outlets. He violated copyright laws by taking work from these outlets and republishing it, not as his own, but to share the news with others to serve his own political or social agenda.

From a copyright standpoint, taking someone else’s intellectual property without their permission is theft, and Pearson PLC called Cirio on that. However, since Pearson no longer has an ownership stake in the Financial Times or The Economist, we don’t know the status of the lawsuit.

From a publishing standpoint, this is dangerous territory as well. As print sales and display and classified advertising have dropped off over time, media outlets have turned to other business models – including paywalls – to generate revenue to sustain their operations. Having someone circumvent that system on a daily basis could be potentially hazardous to that business model.

We think Cirio is missing a key issue – how he believes investigative journalism and other content should be funded. There are significant costs associated with such work. If Cirio has a good answer for that, I’m sure the publishers he has stolen content from would be love to hear it.

While Cirio believes such information should be free, publishers have the right to earn a profit from their work and to enjoy the protections of copyright laws. We support those rights.