I agree with this. And while I avoid techniques like cloaking or keyword spamming myself, if I try to look through someone elses lenses I can see how they might manage to justify it to themselves. There maybe things I do that someone else might question. However none of the above is ripping off other webmasters.
There is a more sinister type of black hat seo out there today and these are the sites that concern me. THEY DO use copyrighted material … and not just this site, but all the “scraper” variety sites – whether they provide a link to me or not, they are nothing but our plageurized content with the Sufi-Scatter technique employed on them – an algorithm designed to shake up all the text (our material) and let it lay where it lands. I for one don’t want my material used in that manner: getting me dinged for duplicate content, competing against me with my own material, giving gambling sites in general a bad name, and frankly littering the internet with junk.
The sites I’m complaining about aren’t made by man, they are automated digitized bullshit.