Not sure what that has to do with scraping. A desktop browser can be used to copy and paste chunks of content and plagiarize a site. We have reasonable copyright protections to protect authors against that. What we need to discharge are the unreasonable laws regarding network access. It's not all or nothing.

Yeah, but that's not just because of web scraping. Plagiarism has been an issue for centuries.

fair enough but I don't think that's the main purpose. There are many many cases where you would want to scrape something and often people would probably be encouraged in doing so in a "polite" way if websites didn't make it hard.

Yes, or if they just provided a csv with all the data most people wanted to scrape anyway with a plain English explanation about how it can be used.

That argument only holds up if you believe in intellectual property. Many of us here do not.