For me, the dividing line is whether someone else's profit is at my expense. If I sell a book, and someone starts hawking cheaper photocopies of it, that takes away my future sales. It's at my expense, and I'm harmed.

But if someone takes my book's story and writes song lyrics derived from it, I might feel a little envy (perhaps I've always wanted to be a songwriter), but I don't think I'd harbor ill will. I might even hope for the song to be successful, as it would surely drive further sales of my book.

It's human nature to covet someone else's success, but the fact is there was nothing stopping me (except talent) from writing the song.

Imagine someone at another company reads your site, and it informs a strategic decision they make at the company to make money around the niche activity you're talking about. And they make lots of money they wouldn't have otherwise. That's totally legal and totally ethical as well.

The reality is, if you do hard work and make the results public, well you've made them public. People and corporations are free to profit off the facts you've made public, and they should be. There are certain limited copyright protections (they can't sell large swathes of your words verbatim), but that's all.

So the idea that you don't want companies to profit from your hard work is unreasonable, if you make it public. If you don't want that to happen, don't make anything public.

How do you square these two? Of course big companies profit from your work, this is why they send all these bots to crawl your site.