Why is that hilarious? We developed an entire community, infrastructure, system, architecture, everything, from scratch, and provide access to something that never existed in the first place on the Internet. That's a significant key difference here.
This would be analogous to you thinking ancestory.com is "aptly hilarious" for arguing against someone just scraping their site for content.
What makes you think you should be entitled to drive by the very unique house that we built, and pointing right at that house and saying "I think I'll take that all of that for myself!"
Because you fail to see the very obvious parallels to scraping. I’m not criticizing your business (I think you provide a valuable service) but your hypocritical stance on what forms of publicly available information are allowed to be gathered and repackaged.
Google’s original (and OpenAI’s) business model was also building a scraping infrastructure, system, and architecture, from scratch — and providing access to something that never existed in the first place.
Public safety communications are radio waves that are broadcasted and the ability to passively monitor them is enshrined in United States law. That is a massively key difference.
If I was sending data into your home from my infrastructure without any action from you whatsoever, and you were reaching up into the air and gathering it and repackaging it, AND the law said that I have no intellectual property rights to said data, then that's a whole different story.
Every time you use Google you benefit from scraping. Scraping is how the world works for the last 25+ years.
You are trying to draw a distinction between data that is pushed and data that is pulled, and maybe there is some economic argument there in terms of resource usage, but that is very context-dependent.
In UK listening to public radio broadcasts is illegal. I think this law is idiotic and ignore it. It seems you do too since there appear to be streams from UK on your site :)
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.
> 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.
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.
Why is it ethical if you build upon other people's data, but unethical if others do it?
Nobody cares how valuable you think your service is. Who's the judge of what's entitled to scrape or not? If you think you're the judge, I find it somewhat arrogant.
It is even more hilarious that you defend a position that, to me, looks authoritarian and individualistic. Might not be your intention, but it's what I read.
Look, when you publicize information that is not a human creation or art, you are GIVING IT TO THE PUBLIC.
The berne convention intentionally left out database sui generis rights outside the scope of copyright. Only in the European Union you have the kind of protection you're looking for. And even in the EU, I've never came across a case where the law was enforced in courts. Maybe because it's a ridiculous right, in my opinion, that would make information flow disfuncional in society.
This would be analogous to you thinking ancestory.com is "aptly hilarious" for arguing against someone just scraping their site for content.
What makes you think you should be entitled to drive by the very unique house that we built, and pointing right at that house and saying "I think I'll take that all of that for myself!"