[unclebucknasty]

>I think scraping websites that don't require authentication is legal in the US nowadays.

The LinkedIn lawsuit resolved to that conclusion, though I think LI is appealing again.

It basically says the site can't take legal action against scrapers of public (non-auth protected) info. Still, there's nothing that says they have to make it easy for you, to include deploying anti-scraping measures, rate limits, redesigns and moving data behind auth.