The Scraping Problem and Ethics
This is one of the more interesting policy questions on the web. Our search engine crawls a lot of blogs and what not on the web, criminals who want to find unpatched wordpress sites try to acrape our crawl by sending automated (scripted) queries to find them. We have developed a number of defenses over the years and pretty regularly ban them[1]. Here is the weird part though, if they hired 300 people on mechanical turk and paid them each a dollar to do one search, it probably would get them more information. Look at folks like 80legs or other 'distributed' scrapers. They exist almost solely to subvert these service terms. Are they evil? Creative?One of the things that stands out is called out in this article. The people involved really want this information, so much that they are willing to expend time and effort to construct scraping bots and what have you . Why not just buy it? How is it that someone gets a request from their boss to get some information, but their boss expects them to get it for free? Can you imagine if they said, "We need pens, pencils, notebooks, staplers, the works for the office here. Oh and you can't spend any money getting that stuff, just get it here." Would they construct some elaborate raid on a nearby Office supplies store using a mercenary army of criminals? Why do that with information?We did an experiment where we would 'grep the web' for you, basically run a regex over a multi-billion page crawl, give you the first 50 results for "free" and you could buy the complete set. I think we sold exactly one of those.It is a weird thing, the OP captured it perfectly.[1] Its a violation of the terms of service.