protecting content - why?

Just received an email from Lastthursday.com today, which was a communication from their new CEO, Richard Alberg.

Just over a month ago I took over as CEO [...]However they ran into the problem of how to make LastThursday a commercially viable enterprise

Ok, they study ways to monetise on their community.

[...]Together with a few colleagues we are now implementing the plan. The first stage is to undertake considerable site development work as this will allow us to provide an environment that we believe will be attractive and valuable to our members

good...

[...]Our community will not be a place where we focus on selling our services to each other. Since members are mainly in micro-businesses with extremely limited buying power for the vast majority of vendors this would be a foolish endeavour that simply smacks of desperation.

mmmmh ok

Nor will our community be a place where we posture for Google. Yes, our site has the potential to be busy enough to attract the search engines. But if we post just to be indexed then very soon our community will be overwhelmed by inane drivel. For this reason all posting areas have now been closed to search engines and can only be viewed by registered members.

And here I jump. It really doesn't make sense.
1) If you log on, you'll see that all the posts are from people who posts the same thing on their own blog. There is not any original content here (except replies to the posts, but I would rather comment directly on the blog than on LastThursday). LastThrusday is effectively an aggregation of articles previously posted by the volunteers on their own blog. And aggregation doesn't really appeal to search engines any more... So I would not worry about the risk of getting too many visitors if I was Richard - I wold worry about getting flagged as content aggregator instead.

2) You must welcome traffic from search engines, and then take action if the quality of your traffic is not meeting your expectations. Again, why worrying about the potential impact of bad quality traffic when you don't get a lot yet.