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Originally Posted by dadioflex
Am I the only one to find it ironic that Taylor quite happily places quotes from AcidZebra in his replies
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Yes, you are.
If you read the forum's terms of service, you'll realize that you and I don't "own" our posts, MR does. Quoting is also well-covered under Fair Use.
You're equating putting up a website and authoring its content to posting a message on someone else's forum, and quoting a forum message as equal to caching an entire site on my own servers, then using that content for my own commercial purposes. That's quite a stretch.
I've made Google the target of this discussion because they are the biggest culprit. They to my knowledge (I might be wrong here) are the only "search engine" to serve complete pages from their own cache, bypassing the content author's intent. They are the only company scanning in complete copyrighted books from libraries, again for their own commercial purposes.
I agree the web needs a search mechanism. But arguing that I have to give up the rights to my own content for "the greater good" is a slippery slope. Google has monetized the entire web for their own enrichment, without authoring any of the content. I never went into business with Google.
Telling me that the web needs search engines, or that no one owns the internet, or that I can put a robots.txt file on my site and trust a web "gentlemens' agreement" - none of that addresses the legality of copying my content without my consent and using it for commercial purposes not authorized by me, the content author.