I’ve read the first post 3 more times, and I’m unable to read it any other way. It’s talking about scraping, and sites that scrape using a better layout.
I can make something useful to end users, but full of other people’s content. That doesn’t mean I have permission to use someone else’s content. To me, those are two different issues.
There are a lot of people who have problems with google and yahoo caching. Certainly, both are making money from the content of others in several ways. But, at least they obey robots.txt, so they will stop if I ask them to. DMOZ can add me, but they use their own descriptions, and there’s really no way to stop anyone from linking to you. (even if you wanted it for some reason, and there are reaons sometimes.)
And Bernie, just to make sure you know, I wasn’t questioning your intelligence when I said you needed a high level of sophistication to catch real cloaking. It was more like saying you need to know php to build a website in php. Cloaking often goes unnoticed. The engines don’t care so much (despite what they say). It’s harder for us to find it because we need to run around spoofing IPs to find it. An engine just needs to check with an IP not known to be registered to them (or not registered to them) and compare the results. Much easier on them than us.
(Edited because I attributed a quote to the wrong person. Fixed it.)