It's interesting, because it's essentially the same exact discussion as traditional copyrights (e.g. for books). The only difference is that book authors are generally not giving away their books for free on their personal website. Copyrights are the attempt to protect the business model of authors who want to sell copies of something that are otherwise extremely easy and cheap to copy. Attempts to legally limit web scraping are an attempt to protect the business of model of creators who want to give away for free copies of things that are easy and cheap to copy, but only we come directly to the creator to get our free copy.
There's a nuanced difference between this new wave of AI scraping and the old "copying a site" scraping, and it's not a copyright issue.
The original problem with copyright was that the website owner's content could be duplicated elsewhere, and thus, violate copyright (as well as suck away the web traffic and presumably lowering revenue).
The new AI issue is not that the content is duplicated elsewhere, but that the knowledge contained in the content is "learnt", and used to produce a different work (totally copyright free - in the truest sense, as it is original). An example would be a recipe website. The site owner could've painstakingly collected recipes from the literature, and cataloged, labelled it, etc, making searching and such easy. But the recipes themselves are not copyrightable, only the expression of the recipe.
So given this info, the AI scrapper now has a large labelled dataset for which to learn from, and to generate new recipes. These new recipes do not violate _any_ existing copyright, as they are entirely original in expression.
I say, as an AI advocate, that the old business model of recipe hosting is destroyed by this new AI, and legislating it to remain by legal means is just fighting against the tide. After all, the world doesn't have a unified jurisdiction, and the internet is world wide, so any would-be violators could just as easily move to a different country to operate.
