I think it's really important to point out one of the major flaws in that highway analogy:
Eminent domain requires payment.
The government cannot come in and merely seize your land under eminent domain and pay you nothing. There is a process & they have to pay you market value for your land and the buildings on it. A couple of my former clients went through this about 15 years ago when the 202 Bypass went through in Montgomery & Bucks County in Pennsylvania. Their houses and land were taken via eminent domain so that the highway could be built, but, I need to say this again: they were paid.
They were paid and there was a process in which they were informed ahead of time. They didn't just drive home one day and find out their home had been snatched, too bad, so sad, no money for you, you should have put your house in a bank vault.
Just taking someone's shit like that without compensation has a name, and it's not eminent domain or anything like it:
It's fucking theft.
(I'm not interested in hearing the same tired shit about how copyright is inherently bad and only protects corporations, because as someone who deals with protecting my livelihood from scammers and scrapers via copyright every goddamned day, this isn't a fun mental exercise/philosophical debate for me, and you're absolutely wrong. Fucking save it for someone ignorant enough and with time to waste on that.)
If a website puts "do not scrape our work for AI purposes" into their terms of service, wouldn't this be considered illegal? Or is this a situation where scraping for AI is considered permissible overall, and for whatever reason the terms of service couldn't reasonably forbid that? I'm wondering if it's filed under fair use laws. Although I suppose it could also be in a gray area and doesn't have precedent yet, so there may not be a proper answer at all. Hm.
(Of course, even if it isn't legal, that doesn't change the fact that legal battles are often quite expensive and a small company like Cara might not be able to afford it. Ugh.)
