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I smell SLAPP suit!!!
Hmmm... Could be.

SLAPP = "Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation"

From http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/documents/Beder_SLAPPS.html:

"...Every year thousands of people are sued in the USA for speaking out against governments and corporations. Multi-million dollar law suits are being filed against individual citizens and groups for circulating petitions, writing to public officials, speaking at, or even just attending, public meetings, organising boycotts and engaging in peaceful demonstrations.[2] These law suits have been labelled "Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation" or SLAPPs by University of Denver academics Penelope Canan and George Pring, who have been studying such suits for more than a decade with the help of funding from the US National Science Foundation...
...One trial judge pointed out:
The conceptual thread that binds [SLAPPs] is that they are suits without substantial merit that are brought by private interests to "stop citizens from exercising their political rights or to punish them for having done so"...The longer the litigation can be stretched out, the more litigation that can be churned, the greater the expense that is inflicted and the closer the SLAPP filer moves to success. The purpose of such gamesmanship ranges from simple retribution for past activism to discouraging future activism.[17]...

The conceptual thread that binds [SLAPPs] is that they are suits without substantial merit that are brought by private interests to "stop citizens from exercising their political rights or to punish them for having done so"...

Actually, due to the selling of online newspaper archives to high school, university and public libraries, this may have crossed over into the realm of a "suit without substantial merit."

We all pay for these online archives through our tax dollars. You can access them online through a password system from your local library, or go to a local university or high school and access them there. I know that Newsbank has an "email this article option". They're not charging you to email the article, so can you email a single article all day long?

I know that I can access a number of these archives in a number of ways, and a majority of Netizens should be able to achieve similar access. (If the selling consortium attempts to control this access, they can be easily smacked down with the ADA)

The playing field may have changed. ;-)