Their actions are unacceptable, whether it fits under the technicality of legality or not. Just like when the BBC intentionally plagiarized the work of Brian Deer, except at least in his case they had the foresight to try asking first, and not just to assume he consented because of the way the data looked.

The NYT explicitly publishes articles in a format designed to be downloaded, processed and have information extracted from that download by a computer program, and then to have that processed information presented to a human.

Speaking of overutilizing a thesaurus, you buried the lede: The text is designed for a human to read.

I don’t like the “just look at it, it was asking for it” defense because that abuses publishers who try to present things in a DRM free fashion for their readers:

“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” president and publisher Tom Doherty explained at the time. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

But DRM-free e-books that circulate online are easy for scrapers to ingest.

The SFWA submission suggests “Authors who have made their work available in forms free of restrictive technology such as DRM for the benefit of their readers may have especially been taken advantage of.”