> In my naive take, authors get to decide how their work is used, not scrapers.
Inasmuch as they've put it on the public web they've already made a decision on who gets to see it, and you really can't stop people from doing what they want with it on a personal level.
If that's print it out and put it on a wall in my house, or use whatever tools I have at my disposal to consume it in any way I please, there's not really anything the author can do about it.
Copyright law says otherwise. As for enforcing the law, you're right, it may be difficult for individual authors to move the needle. But that that doesn't mean it's ok for scrapers to violate the law.
As to what constitutes fair use, that's a whole other story: some scraping may be found to be legal while others may not. Benefiting monetarily from legally dubious scraping only makes that scraping look more infringe-y. Of course, nothing is settled law until a court decides.
The French newspaper blatantly lied on how metadata tags works in the EU debates so I wouldn't trust them on this subject.
That was actually a big enlightening moment for me, as long as money is involved, the so called ethics were out of the window instantly. From the far left newspapers to the far right ones, they all lied on this topic. Only a handful tech blogs and newspapers did tell the truth.
This is not an easy problem to solve. In my naive take, authors get to decide how their work is used, not scrapers.