Precisely. While scraping competitor sites for pricing info etc is exactly as sleazy as it sounds, I have no qualms about scraping in certain situations. A couple that spring to mind:
- Where the site's UI is so dumb that it doesn't let me do what any reasonable person might naturally want to do (this would be the case in the original article)
- Where it's a govt. site and the data is only trickled out through some 90's era search function. Taxpayers paid for the collection of that data, taxpayers pay for its storage etc - give the taxpayers an API to access it!
Why is it wrong to scrape your competitor's site for pricing info? If it's publically accessible, it's free game. As long as such scraping doesn't cause any undue DOS'ing or prevent anyone else from accessing such info.
So not even a tiny bit sleazy then?
The person who started this reply thread repeated part of it twice for good reason. Bots, unchecked, can and do take up a majority of the resources on small to medium sites.
I'd have been much happier with the article if the author had taken a moment to implement a bit of throttling on his end to at least go easy on the remote server.
We offered an API for just two customers, with images and product information for video games. One of them preferred scrapping our page anyway, so we throttled them.
I don't think that the internet, as an organism, is responsive to ToC / T&C. Those are relics of the legacy legal system, and there is no good reason to imagine that the bots born tomorrow will see a need to integrate them.
Spending developer time fighting scraper bots is like spending watchmaker time trying to alter history; you are attempting the impossible and doing so via an unintelligible channel of influence.