[bobblywobbles]

Not a lawyer, but many terms of service prohibit interacting with their website in an automated fashion, as well as collecting their data. In my understanding, scraping a site with these terms already puts you in the wrong.

[akersten]

> many terms of service prohibit interacting with their website in an automated fashion,

Ignoring the fact that I didn't agree to anything just by virtue of requesting a page from a webserver (and, your server sent me the data!), that's such a meaningless phrase that it's certainly unenforceable. What is an automated fashion? Do I have to manually craft my HTTP request by hand-pulsing a voltage on an Ethernet cable, or do I have your permission to let Chrome automate that for me?

[RobSm]

This is so exactly. People do not realize that when they use chrome to view website, chrome is their 'scraper'.

And the goal of webs craping is not to get illegal data, but to have efficiency and performance by not doing something manually but letting computer do the repetitive tasks. It's a productivity tool. You can't make something illegal just because it's an automation instead of 'manual' operation.

[nsonha]

are you a lawyer? Your opinion doesn't really mean anything if you still lose the case at the end. By your logic there isn't a clear way to define DDoS either. Sounds like there is though?

[Chris2048]

> there isn't a clear way to define DDoS either

It isn't clear to me that there is. The difference seems to lie in intent.

You could maybe nail a group making many requests without using the data for anything as making many spurious requests and hence having ill-intent, I suppose. Maybe having dedicated servers for such a tasks prove it even more?

[tommek4077]

Because those terms are the law and cant be ignored in almost all the rest of the world...