[brechin]

Scraping, in itself, is often not prohibited, wrong, illegal, or against most sites' TOS. Your site would allow me, for example, to scrape all your content for my own personal use, but I couldn't re-publish or re-sell the info.

It seems hard to limit legitimate uses of a free resource without changing the requirements on how users access the site (require account signup, use CAPTCHAs, use CSS/JS to only display properly in a browser).

As one who does a lot of scraping, I have encountered few barriers that can't be (legally) overcome with a reasonable amount of effort.

[pbhjpbhj]

>Your site would allow me, for example, to scrape all your content for my own personal use //

On what basis are you claiming this. Sounds like it would be true under fair-use clauses of US Copyright law but it's certainly not true in the UK (and by extension I presume for you to perform on content served from the UK though I've yet to read a thorough treatment of how the [ie any] law works with server locations).

Commercial considerations are usually much broader than selling too: not only could you not resell it but you couldn't distribute it (whether by publishing or otherwise).

[brechin]

From TOS on his site:

"Cucumbertown authorizes you to view, download and/or print the Materials only for personal, non-commercial use, provided that you keep intact all copyright and other proprietary notices contained in the original Materials."

So, for example, I could grab everything from the site (minus copyrighted images, etc.) and make my own personal DB of the content. Obviously that's a lot of effort for a little reward for one person, but if I created a repo with a set of tools for people to do this for themselves it could become a big legitimate source of "scraping" traffic.