Is scraping and crawling stealing?

A spat has blown up over the weekend regarding Oodle and Vast.com “scraping” content from 3rd party sites and re-purposing it inside their environments. This essay is my reaction to the spat. As a founder of edgeio I clearly have an interest in the answer to the question. edgeio does not scrape or crawl. All of its content is permission based (published…