The article completely misses the point that AI scrapers are not a "future threat of AI domination". They already do damage by DDOSing site's networking infrastructure and inflicting very real costs to a site hoster.
Even when the data is completely free, like in case of Wikipedia or OpenstreetMaps, scraping it is unethical and should be illegal. Most of the open data resources have procedures, which allow downloading of the data in the archived form, without need for scraping. They are built with sharing in mind.
So the arguments the article tries to use (what if it is for public good?) has no sense. 1) it is not 2) there are many ways to fetch the open data properly and respectfully.
The article completely misses the point that AI scrapers are not a "future threat of AI domination". They already do damage by DDOSing site's networking infrastructure and inflicting very real costs to a site hoster.
Even when the data is completely free, like in case of Wikipedia or OpenstreetMaps, scraping it is unethical and should be illegal. Most of the open data resources have procedures, which allow downloading of the data in the archived form, without need for scraping. They are built with sharing in mind.
So the arguments the article tries to use (what if it is for public good?) has no sense. 1) it is not 2) there are many ways to fetch the open data properly and respectfully.