Among the many things Doctorow gets wrong in That Post is this:

"It's not 'unethical' to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That's just 'a search engine.'"

Apart from the fact that AI companies are particularly malicious in the way they scrape the web, I'd say we accept search engine scraping mostly on the premise that it's done for the benefit of the scraped sites. There's no such principle of mutual benefit in AI scraping — the AI company gets the value of the data scraped and you get bupkis at best, and possibly DDoS'd

@lrhodes

You make an interesting point, and this brings up something that has been bugging me.

It almost feels like trying to equivocate what Aaron Swartz (RIP) was being charged with and what these sloperators are doing.

I hadn't made that connection until you posted this here, and I don't want to give these evil companies any ideas. I think if anyone tries to say those two things are the same, that argument should be rejected immediately and loudly.

I'm not suggestions anyone has done this yet, but I could see that move coming.