Wouldn't it be easier if they published a list where they scraped their data from in the first place. Filling out forms, scanning id and sending it only to learn they didn't capture any of your data seems like such a waste of time.
On the other hand, they already know which sites they used to scrape data. So publish it, maybe with a handy lookup portal where you can enter urls to see if it got scraped.
I prefer an opt-in model, but that's not likely to happen any time soon, so this seems reasonable while this gets legally sorted out. Just because something is transmitted publicly doesn't mean it's without copyright. Otherwise any song broadcast on radio is up for grabs to be resold by anyone receiving it.
The article goes into detail about the experimental setup. According to the article they are going to use cuprates mounted on a balance. The deviations in the balance are going to be read using laser interferometry. They are using cuprates so they can easily switch between a superconducting phase and an insulating phase. This is to measure if the virtual particles have a buoyancy force.
The reason why they want to test this is explained in the paragraphs above it. It also explains why this method was chosen and what the difficulties are.
I have no idea why you would categorize this as a human interest story.
The first entry even stated that they were guidelines and if you have a valid reason to deviate: discuss it and you'll get an exception.
The discussion thing was mainly for new coders. We had a library part of the code that was used by many programs. Optimizing parts of it for their use case, could make it unusable for the others who used it.
Communication is key. If you discuss, before implementing it, why you're making certain design decisions then everything goes a lot smoother. If there are objections, keep in mind that the worst case isn't throwing away your design and starting over. The worst case is implementing it and screwing over your fellow coders.
If you're in the EU, you could use EU Directive 2009/24/EC. Someone with a better grasp of the law should check this, but you should be allowed to decompile & fix parts of the program which causes "interoperability" problems. It doesn't matter what EULA says or if it's copyrighted code.
EDIT: appartently there was a ruling in the Court of Justice of European Union on this