>large amount of work into scraping those sites
I think this states clearly the founders attitude about data rights. It's the Wild West out there still.
Wat?
That's precisely the point, isn't it? Right now there's no incentive for them to care. The percentage of users who care about open data right now is pretty small, mostly confined to the very tech-savvy. Maybe this punchfork acquisition kerfuffle can be used to teach non-tech-savvy users the importance of open data. An open, free recipe database - importantly, that follows the punchfork model of not including instructions, so the actual recipe sites still get traffic - is a step in that direction.
C'mon man! It's 2103. Not only are scrappers ridiculously easy to build, it doesn't take a ton of work to build a bot in Perl and have it scan the internet for recipe's.
This guy is a total d-bag. Not sure what his deal is, or was, but everything I've read makes me not like him at all. Did he get screwed out of a ton of cash with the acquisition or what?