Everything is both legal and illegal until a lawsuit happens. Then it collapses depending a little bit on the facts and mostly on who has the better lawyers.

I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an access control device (DMCA 1201).

I wonder what legal gymnastics are needed for "I can scrape anything off the web ignoring copyright and build a product from this, but you can’t even display what’s on my webpage elsewhere”.

Perhaps that is it in fact. The act of protecting it from scraping means you object. 99% of the blogged contents etc. Big AI helped themselves to was just… there. Public. Not free from copyright but still not paywalled.

Thin skins over at there at X

Pretty sure it's legal when you do it for your own use (same as browsing a website) but it's illegal to redistribute web scraped results.

Now I want to know, what happens if you redistribute an "AI summary" of the copyright material?

Thats "Billionaire Use" -- its like a "Fair Use" exemption but for billionaires.

scraping content is mostly legal, redistributing content is not.

if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.

sites like archive.ph are in a similar bucket btw, and yet nobody's complaining (except websites seeing people evading their paywall). but at the end of the day it's not really fair to apply laws differentially on the basis of whose political ideas we like more.

It’s the rehosting of the content not the scraping

Edit: not a moral stance