&gt; I wonder how this is legal and considered acceptable. I wish I knew how Google and others gets away with scraping content [...]<p>Well, here&#x27;s the answer: &quot;transformative&quot; reuse of content is explicitly permitted under copyright law. Simply reproducing the content and charging for it would not fall under this provision, but building an archive of publicly available information is - quite appropriately, permissible.<p>There was recently a very large court case regarding this principle and its application to Google Books. Google won, by demonstrating that their search index is not equivalent to and does not affect the market for the original work - a &quot;transformative&quot; use.<p>Sharing is good. Publicly available works achieve their aims only by being consumed by others - anyone who publishes a work free of charge should expect it to be, and remain, publicly accessible.