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So they crawled the web, stole the information to populate their own database and then pretend it was "illegal" for others to steal it back?

The weird attitude in the Internet Tech company scene is akin to Gold Rush scenarios.

Who are the native people?

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> So they crawled the web, stole the information to populate their own database and then pretend it was "illegal" for others to steal it back?

These days, this seems to be "modus operandi". The bet is who can get closer to the administration to suddenly enforce the un-enforce-able. For your own safety. You wouldn't steal a car now, would you?

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To acquiesce to manufactured "social truths", to resign complacently to them being "modus operandi" means to place yourself outside of the society you live in.

You make yourself subject to a social reality you presume outside of your control. But you enabled them, if by nothing else, by your silent acceptance.

Moral and ethical judgements cannot be left to the very same people they are supposed to restrain in the first place.

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Who knew the fix all along was just scolding people for being the wrong kind of frustrated
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heavy metal guitar chords commence
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You engage in ridiculing your own demise. Why so sure you'll enjoy it?
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Don't think it's unreasonable. They crawled it and made it available in an easy to digest form. You can't take their copy and start distributing it infinitely while paying them for one-time read. Write your crawler, and crawl the web on your own if you want... and give it away!
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You glaze over the fact, they stole the data to begin with and never recuperate their sources. That's not "reasonable".

They don't make it available "easily" either, they place all kinds of hurdles on it, including you having to pay for stolen goods.

You then go on, equating wildly different situations: on one hand, a multi-billion dollar company, easily able to set up such a scheme. On the other (me representing) the public, regularly anything but destitute.

So no, you're the unreasonable one here. So are they.

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Search engines that obey robots.txt are stealing?

If someone does not want on a search engine index and they say not to index, and then get indexed anyhow is stealing.

But a “please read my content and make available to your users” then claim doing so is stealing seems a bit out there.

What am I missing?

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There is a difference between "read my content and make it available to your users" and "make money by reading my content and making it available to your users". Terms of use like this are trying to say "we are the only ones who get to make money from this", and therein lies the problem.
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Well said. I'm sure a subset of the content that Cloudflare has indexed also has terms like Cloudflares, that they happily ignored.
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The data is the moat, the compute is a cost center.
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“You're looking at 'em...”

- Tony Soprano

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Not to mention: "retain, cache, or store Output beyond what is reasonably necessary to display such Output to your authorized end users in the ordinary and real-time course of use" which would seem to preclude storing it in a long lived session.
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The phrase "reasonably necessary" is infuriatingly vague.
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