IANAL, but I'd suggest that it doesn't matter how people "feel", there is a legal element here. For example, you can scrape NASDAQ data from any number of sites

IANAL, but I'd suggest that it doesn't matter how people "feel", there is a legal element here. For example, you can scrape NASDAQ data from any number of sites, but those sites pay NASDAQ for the data feed. You do not have the right to use that data. You need to get permission from NASDAQ. (I'm just using them as an example. You don't really get to decide how somebody else's data gets used. Using your sports stastics example, this will become a grey area as writing becomse more automated, but at the moment, a writer gets a 'statistic' like a score which is made publicly available. There are no limits on using that statistic. But you didn't automate the process of spreading the stats, you, in theory found a fact and wrote about it. This is different from just giving a feed of stats, or linking through a bunch of services.