Right, but other sites scrape that free info and republish it with the goal of drawing traffic. Apparently, Stack Overflow has an API. I don't know the functionality of their API, but it doesn't matter: via API or web scraping, the content of the SO database is all over the web, yet SO is thriving.

Yet there seem to be people who use their data to make a bit of money on the side. I haven't had time to do so, but I wanted to ask SO if the translated SO pages on humbug.in/stackoverflow are against any rules. He punches their pages trough googles translate and stuffs them full with banners.

Nearly drove me nuts because a friend who I was working on a project with kept searching in german. As a result he got the terribly translated pages first followed by the actual SO pages.