[mikestew]

Your mistake is in assuming that just because you form a construct around payments, rights, and obligations of the receiver of an HTTP response, everyone else will agree with you. I'm not doing anything "without paying" because there was no "paying" agreed to by me. Content sites and advertisers just made that up from whole cloth. As if they just show up on the playground and get to make the rules now.

The playground rules were simple: you prop a server that responds to HTTP requests, and in response you send an HTTP response that generally contains content. That's it, those are the rules. If someone wants to make money from this system, that's on them, not me. If they can't make money, well what did you expect from a playground where everything is freely given? Creating straw man "rules" around payment and moral obligations is futile. If the responder has issue with what I do with their response, perhaps sending content using HTTP is not the proper medium for what they want to accomplish.

In summary, just because you want to march in and monetize shit does not mean that any of the rest of us have any legal or moral obligation whatsoever to play along.