I don’t think we’re There Yet. Once we build machines that can seek out and acquire the resources necessary for their own growth/healing/reproduction, whose rig

I don’t think we’re There Yet. Once we build machines that can seek out and acquire the resources necessary for their own growth/healing/reproduction, whose rights are worth fighting for, it’ll be easier to make that case. Anyways, that wouldn’t help here. No machines’ rights are being infringed by preventing you from scraping the web. If said self-reproducing machines were denied access to websites on the grounds that it would be considered “scraping”, I’d be at the front of the march to legislate against that kind of discriminatory behavior; but that’s not what we have here. I do think that, given the obvious potential for both value and harm in scraping, it might make sense to provide licenses for demonstrably non-harmful scrapers.