Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms
While I have sympathy for what the scrapers are trying to do in many cases, it bothers me that this doesn't seem to address what happens when badly-behaved scrapers cause, in effect, a DOS on the site.For the family of sites I'm responsible for, bot traffic comprises a majority of traffic - that is, to a first approximation, the lion's share of our operational costs are from needing to scale to handle the huge amount of bot traffic. Even when it's not as big as a DOS, it doesn't seem right to me that I can't tell people they're not welcome to cause this additional system load.Or even if there was some standardized way that we could provide a dumb API, just giving them raw data so we don't need to incur the additional expense of the processing for creature comforts on the page designed to make our users happier but the bots won't notice.