To examine the ethics of web scraping, I think it's useful to strip away all the technical trappings and just look at it as an interaction between two people. W

To examine the ethics of web scraping, I think it's useful to strip away all the technical trappings and just look at it as an interaction between two people. We'll call them Chloe the Creator and Sam the Scraper. Chloe has expended effort/energy/resources to gather and collate information which provides value in some way to Sam. Sam has invested nothing, risked nothing, and expended no effort with regard to that information. Chloe decides, in her own interest, to give the public access to the information. Does Chloe have a moral right to try and impose conditions on that access? Does Sam have a moral duty to make a good-faith effort to abide by those conditions? My answer to both of these questions is yes.