Historically, when Google did it, they did it to create an index, which a lot of people found useful as a way to find information they were looking for. This used to mean people would come and visit your website, where they could engage with the website creator directly through a variety of different means.
Google doing it now to digest all the content and mulch it all together to return a regurgitated form of it is a very different proposition, and that is what people are annoyed about when "the little guys" (funny name for startups with multiple billions of dollars of raised capital) are doing the same thing.
For many it's not about "moral ethics", it's about actual survival. If nobody is visiting their website, nobody is buying their products or engaging with their community or whatever.
If you're scraping content for no other purpose than to mechanistically reword it for commercial purposes, then it's not really surprising that people have issues with it.
Historically, when Google did it, they did it to create an index, which a lot of people found useful as a way to find information they were looking for. This used to mean people would come and visit your website, where they could engage with the website creator directly through a variety of different means.
Google doing it now to digest all the content and mulch it all together to return a regurgitated form of it is a very different proposition, and that is what people are annoyed about when "the little guys" (funny name for startups with multiple billions of dollars of raised capital) are doing the same thing.
For many it's not about "moral ethics", it's about actual survival. If nobody is visiting their website, nobody is buying their products or engaging with their community or whatever.
If you're scraping content for no other purpose than to mechanistically reword it for commercial purposes, then it's not really surprising that people have issues with it.