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.
You said "other sites scrape that free". I agree that info is all over the web but it isn't scraped, and I don't think you should keep calling it scraping.