[pmoriarty]

Oh, you're talking about them inferring that you must have scraped them because you used or published data that only they had.

Not every scraper has publishing or using data in a detectable way as their motive.

For instance, I sometimes scrape a website to make an archive of it for my own personal use. I never publish the results or use them in any way that the website owners would ever know about. So the only way they could know that they were scraped is if I left some kind of scraping signature while scraping (such as scraping from a single IP and doing it quick enough to pop on their radar or perhaps regularly enough -- ie. without random waits between request, etc).

What you're talking about is probably mostly a concern to people/companies who are somehow making money from scraping data on other people's websites.