If it is visible, it is recordable. Scraping should fall under fair use policy: recording a TV program is OK, repackaging it and reselling to competing channel is not.
Scraping for research and/or personal use should always be legal.
Even if the burden put on the scraped website is far from "fair"? At my last job we had half the server capacity used by scraping bots most of the time, despite blocking Tor (since it was used exclusively for scraping most of the time). Such use translates into real operating costs just for being scraped, depending on your way of monetizing with 0 (no ad views) or negative income from those "users" on top (sometimes it's the competition or agencies selling your data so people don't have to use your website).
The argument I was against was that LinkedIn should bear the cost of scrapers, and if they can't they must change their monetisation strategy to something that can.
LinkedIn is holding your resume data for random, selling access to the recruiters you don't want to hear from because they have deep pockets.
Imagine a world where you don't have to re-enter your education and work history for every job you apply to! Imagine not having to create a new resume every time you decide to switch jobs! Imagine just sharing a semi-private URL instead.
I remember reading that facebook had done something similar to a social media aggregation for scraping content from its website. This whole opening up of law suits for getting information that companies put out publicly for all to see seems like a dangerous new precedent.
This should be interesting. In my opinion, this is the 21st century equivalent of people going into libraries and making photocopies of books and articles. But it has interesting precedents with Craigslist suits. I wonder if there will be a suit that tries to pierce the protections of user contributed content liability by using the fact that the company considers that content their proprietary property. Thus it is no longer UCC and they should be liable for any infringing or malicious use of that data.
Your analogy is better if the books or articles are written by the same users, like eg research papers and the editors (like Springer) dont allow the writers to even share their articles on the web.
So, what if I will just scrape Google caches of LinkedIN profiles? I will never touch precious resumes at LinkedIN servers that way, and LinkedIN will never sue Google, since how else people will get to LinkedIN if not through Google? If only LinkedIN will not invest into some behavioural science to alter human habit of navigational search.
Scraping for research and/or personal use should always be legal.