The analogy here is that a website that is connected to the internet is considered "free to browse" just as a radio signal is "free to listen to".

The issue isn't listening or browsing (so long as it's not DoS-ing), it's what you do with that information and whether you have permission to use the information (copyright of the host / broadcaster) in the way that you are and in the way that was intended.

So you only point that scrapping data is bad because the cost? How do you know that the site someone is scraping doesnt have fixed cost?

no, scraping data is bad because this is against owners wishes.

In US, if you broadcast, the by law you consent to be received and recorded.

If you scrape data, there is no such law. And if you get consent (say by finding the permissive robots.txt), then go ahead and scrape.

> no, scraping data is bad because this is against owners wishes

The broadcasters weren't happy about home cassette recording either, and the case went all the way up to the supreme court. If I can legally record cable, then it's nit a stretch to say I can also "record" what's on the public Internet for my own use.

Morally speaking, we have to consider the other side of the equation - operator may not be happy about being scraped, but as a user, is it okay for me to build or use a scraper-based price-comparison or price-tracking platform? I'd say yes, even though most sellers wouldn't want to have this data scraped.

I see a difference between "scrape for personal use", "scrape for public good" and "scrape to earn money from".

Everything is fine for personal use - you are choosing how to consume the websites, and if you choose to do it by extracting all the data into tables, that's fine.

Public good scraping is slightly murkier morally but I guess it's also fine? Similar to "fair use" copyright exceptions. (Unless it's commercial companies pretending to do "public good" solely for their own benefits, like AI "open dataset". Those should be banned.)

"Scrape to earn money from" is not OK. And sadly, this seems to be the majority of all scraping projects, such as: copy the sites wholesale and display your own ads on them, collect data to train AI on, for SEO (=make everyone's search results worse).

The good analogy is what would you do in a public place like a cafe: can you do your personal work? No problem at all. Can you put a non-commercial poster or sign? This may be OK. Can you earn money off it (say sell your own stuff inside)? No way.

> Scrape to earn money from" is not OK.

This is exactly how search engines like Google and Bing work though. So I don't think "earning money" is the right place to draw the line. Reproducing websites wholesale is also illegal and immoral IMO, but there's a lot of gray area between search engines and cloning the content of entire websites to slap ads on.