The hypocrisy is that if you tried scraping google results they would block you so fast your head would spin.
Wikipedia is open for everyone, and in my opinion that means you don't get any right (legal or moral) when someone, anyone, uses that information within the rules you set in the license.
If they want to prevent this, they should change their license.
Naturally Google won't prevent users form accessing the search since that would invalidate the purpose of their site, and equally naturally Wikipedia won't change the license since it too would invalidate the purpose of their site. Both however do complain and may invoke blocks when they feel that people are abusing the permission that is normally given.
From a legal stand point, Google can arbitrarily revoke access to their site and in similar way wikipedia could revoke access (which is not the same as changing the license) to Google. They could block Googles bots, or change the targeted information for which they intend to scrape. Wikipedia could publishing a explicit statement on how Google (as a legal entity) may access their servers and Google would be legally bound to follow it or be charged under hacking laws.
I didn't say that, and I disagree with that. The web isn't "default open", and Google has a license that you agree to when using their product that says what you can and cannot do with it. And scraping their site is against that "license" (aka the "terms of service") giving them both the legal and the moral right to stop you while keeping it "publicly" accessible.
Wikipedia's terms of service specifically state that anyone is free to read, print, share, and reuse their articles and other media under free and open licenses. They have no more right (moral or legal) to take issue with youtube including wikipedia snippets in their application than Linus Torvalds has the right to take issue with Google using Linux in their application. As long as you follow the license to the letter, you are legally fine, and in my opinion as long as you follow the "spirit" of the license, you are morally fine.
I don't see this move by google as violating either of them. The director of Wikimedia might not like it, and that's fine, but Google is in no way under any obligation to stop what they are doing (again, legally or morally in my opinion).
Wikipedia can adjust their terms of use, but they themselves have a framework for how they can update their own terms, and part of that requires a 30 day comment period [0]. If they have issue with this, they can absolutely update their terms, but I would never donate to the wikimedia foundation again and would stop contributing if they are going to start deciding who is allow access to their data that they champion as "free and open".
So all they need to do if they wanted a legal tool to prevent google is to create a community policy which dictate how scraping may be done for the purpose of youtube. No 30 day comment period.
Further down on that page, section 10. Management of Websites: *"The Wikimedia community and its members may also take action when so allowed by the community or Foundation policies applicable to the specific Project edition"
And finally in section 12. Termination: "We reserve the right to suspend or end the services at any time, with or without cause, and with or without notice."
In summary, they reserve the right to block access in response to abuse.
And you are correct that the terms of service and license are different (even if there is a bit of overlap) but it's the license that matters when you are "copying" the content and reproducing it on your own, and the license is either CC BY-SA or GFDL both of which have no ability to prevent any one specific person from using the information.
>In summary, they reserve the right to block access in response to abuse.
This isn't abuse, its use. If copying the data from wikipedia and serving it up with attribution is abuse, then they need to update their terms of service and licenses to explicitly say so (which would pretty much end wikipedia). If Google is harming their infrastructure by causing excessive load doing the scraping, wikipedia has every right to block them. But Google is not (as far as we know), and therefore wikipedia does not have any moral right to block access, and Google has no moral or legal obligation to stop scraping and reproducing the content on their own servers. And if wikipedia does block Google from the service, Google has every right (legally and morally in my opinion) to find an alternate way of getting the data and reproducing it that doesn't access wikipedia's servers directly.