Something to consider

A lot of people come in here and ask whether things are okay, or whether they're ethical, or whatever.

I have always had a very simple way of answering these questions:

"What if someone did that to me?"

And I'm not talking about what if you were that other person or company, either.

It's very easy to say "Oh, if I were Amazon/eBay/Apple it would not matter to me because I would be far too big for that."

I'm talking about if they did it to YOU.

You're going to scrape someone else's content? Okay, so what if they scraped yours? You wrote (or bought) an original article, and someone else is going to scrape it. How do you feel about that? Seem like a good idea? Are you saying "yeah, cool, great job!" about it?

How about opt-ins on your sales page? What if you sent traffic to someone else's sales page, and instead of buying the product they decided to opt-in on the list instead? How would you feel about that, knowing that you might not ever get your commission now? Make you happy, does it? Give you warm cozy feelings about the vendor? Or... not?

When you think about it that way, it starts not really mattering to you whether it's ethical or legal or "okay." What matters is whether it's nice. Be nice to people. You want them to be nice to you, right?

And, in general, being nice tends to be ethical and legal and okay.

Provided you can take the heat from all the not-nice people complaining that you're leaving money on the table.