I’m not sure about the legal aspect, but morally it’s hard to feel sympathetic for publishers who are choosing to provide the complete articles to the Quora bot.
There’s nothing stopping them from providing the same abridged, paywalled articles to bots that they do to people, but they choose not to for the purpose of SEO.
Also, obligatory mention that if publishers were willing to participate in something like Apple News+ (without injecting ads into paid-for content!), they’d have more customers. Instead, I am afraid to subscribe to most legacy media sites like NYT because I don’t know how many hours it’ll cost me to cancel—and managing dozens of subscriptions when I just want a few articles a year from each just isn’t worth it. SubStack, LWN, etc, make it very easy to stop and start a subscription, so I’m happy to pay for them when I find value in almost all of the content.
There’s nothing stopping them from providing the same abridged, paywalled articles to bots that they do to people, but they choose not to for the purpose of SEO.
Also, obligatory mention that if publishers were willing to participate in something like Apple News+ (without injecting ads into paid-for content!), they’d have more customers. Instead, I am afraid to subscribe to most legacy media sites like NYT because I don’t know how many hours it’ll cost me to cancel—and managing dozens of subscriptions when I just want a few articles a year from each just isn’t worth it. SubStack, LWN, etc, make it very easy to stop and start a subscription, so I’m happy to pay for them when I find value in almost all of the content.