Spain Blocks Archive.today Over Copyright, Redirects Users to 'Illegal Site' Warning

Spain’s Intellectual Property Commission, operating under the Ministry of Culture, has ordered ISPs to block multiple domains belonging to Archive.today, the widely used web-archiving and page-snapshot service. Most Spanish users who try to reach the site are now redirected to a government landing page declaring the destination an ‘illegal website’ and citing a formal resolution from the Commission’s Second Section as the legal basis for the block.

The interstitial page frames the visitor, not just the service, as complicit: it states that accessing the site amounts to facilitating illegal access to copyright-protected content, and warns that users are ‘contributing to an illegal and criminal activity’ while putting their own security, data, and devices at risk. That accusatory language aimed directly at end users is unusual for a copyright-enforcement block and reads more like a deterrent than a neutral notice.

The order continues a pattern of aggressive, copyright-driven site-blocking in Spain, where broad enforcement measures have previously caught unrelated services in the crossfire. Because Archive.today is a general-purpose tool for preserving and citing web pages — heavily relied on by journalists, researchers, and to counter link rot — the block raises familiar tensions between rights-holder enforcement and legitimate access to a public archiving resource, and it is trivially circumvented via VPNs or alternative resolvers.