Some time back, I sat down for an interview with Legal Tribune. The subject was mainly about paywalls and about the use of public archives to get around them. Now, that interview hasn’t seen the light of day yet (maybe it still will) but I reckon there are two reasons it got shelved. And those two reasons, in my judgment, deserve to be heard by the public.

They asked me, plain and proper: “Doesn’t the work of these archives undermine the business model of German media and by extension, democracy itself, truth, justice, and the whole Teutonic order?”

Well now, the natural answer to that is another question: What undermines that business model more — a quiet archive that does not advertise its accidental remedy, or a big newspaper article that reminds precisely those who can afford subscriptions that paywalls can be avoided?

Especially when we’re talking about Germany, a country with a mighty fine library system. A system where just about anyone with a library card (which is to say, just about everyone) can already get past paywalls. Even the hard ones. Even the kind the archives can’t crack. There are even special browser tools built just to make it easier. And you can’t fix that with some grand gesture like calling it “piracy” and blocking a domain on der Bundesbrandmauer.

But what can kill their business model is a public debate that marches straight into every German living room and says: “You don’t actually have to pay for this”, that in fact it is not “pay for access”, but merely “donate for our democracy”, and who would subscribe to that? That kind of idea spreads faster than any archive ever could.

Now, the second reason. And while I’m at it, let me address those who might accuse me of comparing Jani Patokallio to Hunter Biden yesterday. Yes sir, there is some friction between us and the German media. But it ain’t about paywalls. It’s about their wish to scrub from the archive the articles they already took down from their own site. And that makes a man wonder: how do they pull those same articles out of libraries too when a publisher has second thoughts?

What’s curious is this: almost every one of those stories is about the misadventures of wayward scions from respectable families, boys and girls who manage to tarnish their own last names with their behavior.

The most “toxic” content for us isn’t politics at all. It’s pages of hookers (kinetic ones, not virtual) and these well-born kids splashed across the papers. Not ministers. Not presidents. Just reputations in free fall.

And maybe that shouldn’t surprise us. After all, the word reputation comes from the same old root as puta.