Comment by computerthings

Where I live, people often put books in boxes out on the sidewalk as giveaways. They're worth nothing, but I love browsing through them if I have time, and sometimes I find something that does interest me. Books I want to throw away I never throw away, I put them out for others to take. I bet most of them just perish in the rain, but it's fine, it's better than throwing them in the trash right away.

It's something people do for people. It's not "in the public domain" for companies to gobble up with machines.

> There's no law against scraping

There's no law against incurring as heavy and pernicious social and material costs to commercial scrapers as is physically possible within legal bounds, either. So what's the problem?