It's hard for me to imagine a legitimate defense of this that isn't a wholesale rejection of the concept of intellectual property.
Are they?
A Google referrer gets you the content of the article at most, and at least it gets you some JavaScript. Which is executed client-side.
Forbes serves up code, which the client should be able to parse, render and execute in any way they see fit, as it was served to their machine upon a simple GET request.
The client is under no obligation to behave well, in a programmatic sense, because it is just handed markup and source code, with an expectation of parsing and rendering it in a way fit for the client's user, otherwise you may as well ban screen reader's for doing things in unexpected ways.
> ... distribute it on his own
We both agree here that it would be bad ethics to do this.
Put another way, I don't believe the specifics of the way the web operates serve as a solid foundation for an ethical principle. Far better, I think, to look at the people involved and focus on treating them fairly and honestly, abstracting away the medium of communication as an implementation detail.
