axl,
if someone has done something the hurt you or your property and you can show it with hard evidence that he is the one who did it, and a specific damage was coused to you directly by his activities and you can quontitae it to $$$$, then go after him, take a lawyer and get it back.
what the scrappers in my mind are doing can be compared right now in the legal system to something like tax planning.
yep, it is not socially nice to do tax planning in order to pay less taxes since you are hurting the community by contributing less cash to be spent for community needs, but as the court ruled, tax planning is legit , but some people it may look like a “trick” and not cocially accepted by again what acceprted and whats not is very subjective, this is why we have laws !
now if the law says that it is Ok to do tax planning, the fact that other people do not like people who do tax planning does not make it ligally wrong or a reason to get this guy in court, as long as the tax planing is done according to the law, it is OK
now, you are debating if taking a few sentences from the site is legit or not, this is the 1st discussion here, from what I know (and again I do not ancourage people to do it or support it) it is OK, and by saying OK i mean the law allows it
now the 2nd thing that you are raising is that it hurts your site and income, now this is new, if you can PROVE that it is hurt due to this and actually show how and what are the losses coused due to this , then take a lawyer
IMHO, no one can prove it since no one really knows how google work or the other SEs, it is all speculation, I would love if you would take it to court, get google on the stand and have them tell you how exactly that affect the ranking, you will do a HUGE service for the entire SEO community, but realisticly it will not happen, more tehn that, the scrapper can say by by providing you links from his pages he actually contributed to your rank, now this has more support within the google original published paper.
if you think nothing new was said in this thread that was not said before you are WRONG, I read almost every post here for the last few years and I think you will find in this thread information that was not discussed before, starting from the 1st post in the thread.
if you want to kill this thread becouse you do not want people to contredict you and doing that by flaming and running people off, it is also ok and a legit strategy,but i think that I at least will surly continue this discussion with many members here on a PM bases like we did in the past.
it is up to the moderators here what type of discussion is being conducted here