No one gave them permission to access their webservers back then either. Before it's cited that there is precedent in law, that is in the US. No such precedent exists in my country, and our laws suggest that unauthorized access regardless of "gates up or down" would constitute trespassing. There are also no protections for scrapers coming out of prior lawsuits, and copying copyrighted material is of course illegal.

Which is just to point out that the world wide web is not its own jurisdiction, and I believe AI companies are going to be finding that an ongoing problem. Unlike search, there is no symbiosis here, so there is an incentive to sue. The original IP holders do not benefit in any way. Search was different in that way.

Search engines never claimed that their content was orignal, and redirect to the original author (which gets proper retribution)