The publisher of the information is ultimately responsible for the disclosure of the information. How it is read is of no consequence, as the information has been provided to be read. Certainly, there are issues about resource usage i.e. heavy readers, such as scrapers, but throttling is a perfectly acceptable approach to overuse of resources for both parties, as access is still available over managed resources.

The nature of the original complaint is authorised access to publicly published information. Again, if you do not want people to read publicly published information, do not publish it publicly.

And as a side note - we don't need inappropriate analogies; the web is real, we can discuss the real issue.