Comment by shevy-java
3 days ago
> Because they placed the content on a public website.
I don't think this is a very good argument. For instance, if I have a company, called 'tickle-cats', I may expect regular customers to go and tickle a cat for, say, 1 cent, as cost. So I would expect regular people to visit my homepage.
I may not necessarily expect or want to have bots, scrapers and what not, per se. I may have this by extension - possibly, e. g. to rank a website more highly. But bots and so forth are not my real target audience to begin with (and some are just malicious, trying to disrupt the business); some company owners may want to not have to do anything with them (bots, crawlers etc...). That's just one example of many more; I don't think the distinction "public versus private" is the only one that can be applied here.
All you are saying is that scraping is an undesirable form of access, different from authentic access.
However, it is something that happens, and when you license copyrighted material to someone such that they have permission to serve it to visitors on their website, they are not automatically required to be a cop guarding your material against scraping.
There is an understanding that public-facing content gets scraped and used for AI training and whatever else. Someone licensing content into that role is accepting that reality.
Also, anyone in their right mind granting consent to Meta for scraping will still block them from doing that. That action speaks louder that the consent. If some content licensor accuses you of giving Meta consent to steal their material, you can point to your implemented physical defense against that and argue that the only way it could be happening is if Meta are circumventing your utmost efforts block scraping.