Resist metaphors for this sort of thing. Resist them strongly. There are no physical analogues for the internet that are close enough to matter. When I scan a book page, the author and publisher are so untroubled they don't even know, indeed, they can't know. When I look at a web page, they have to actually serve it to me, costing them some amount of money. Money you can only call trivial when you aren't scraping pages by the thousands. This is enough to render your metaphor irrelevant by virtue of significant, both in the sense of "sizable" and in the sense of "relevant", difference.
There's no physical analogue to scraping a database-driven site. The question of exactly how legal it is probably won't be settled until that fact penetrates the legal system; until then it depends on what metaphor you sell to a given judge.
but you left out the part of my metaphor that included selling the scanned book later on. That is where the issue can be become public. That is where you're affecting the livelihood of said authors/publishers.
I'm really playing devil's advocate here, I do very large amounts of scraping online for various projects and do not bat an eye lash at what I'm doing. If it's online, it's there for the taking. If you don't want me to scrape it, hide it.
That doesn't save it, though. You misinterpret me as doing precisely what I'm advocating against; I'm not making an argument by metaphor. I'm simply observing yours doesn't work. It only has to not work in one way for it to be invalid. That doesn't make your conclusion wrong, it just makes your argument invalid.
In fact I agree with you that it is broadly speaking incumbent upon someone who does not want to be scraped to have at least some protections technically enforced, however feebly, and you should not go out of your way to violate such protections however feeble they may be. But I come to that conclusion thinking about the monetary issues and bandwidth issues and ethical issues directly, not by making a bad analogy to people leaving doors open or locks on gates in the middle of the field or houses constructed out of glass.
no, despite the rhetoric you employed here, you're still skirting my rebuttal and lacking any real point other than to show off how many words you can use to describe absolutely nothing.
My point is that someone works to create something that is freely available to peruse (website content = book at library), and anyone who comes in and copies and sells that content will make said author upset.
There's no physical analogue to scraping a database-driven site. The question of exactly how legal it is probably won't be settled until that fact penetrates the legal system; until then it depends on what metaphor you sell to a given judge.