The whole point of publication is so that humans can read it. Robots not so much, especially if they're not paying customers. This is the distinction between how the web works technically and how it works socioeconomically.
This is the next iteration of things like the news snippet case. Publishers are not happy that Google crawls their content (at their expense) and then republishes it on their own site, while serving ads around it and getting user data, without cutting in the publisher who originally made it. And, for what little it's worth, owns the copyright.
> Again it sounds like the people who are upset by this really want to publish images rather than web pages.
More like people don't want to lose money because a 3rd party stole all of their content, and then repurposed it to show people before they visit their website.
This is the next iteration of things like the news snippet case. Publishers are not happy that Google crawls their content (at their expense) and then republishes it on their own site, while serving ads around it and getting user data, without cutting in the publisher who originally made it. And, for what little it's worth, owns the copyright.