> Unfortunately, this is one of the most effective methods of discouraging wanton scraping.

Maybe they could require you to add (and verify) a credit card and then not charge it for fewer than 30 queries a month.

Of course, it's a solution that brings other problems, but it's one way of using payment systems to provide the service and keep it free for everyone but the scrapers.

A simple, pretty much unscrapable system: App on your phone that you use to take a picture of the license. The system returns the current status.

That is far from unscrapable. Could probably be done within hours with the Android emulator.

If you had a picture of the license you could certainly scrape it--but then you're doing it legitimately anyway, no need to scrape. Without a picture of the license it's not going to return anything but an error.

And I’m sure it would be openALPR on the backend, which would gladly parse a dynamically generated “picture” of a license.

They could have just added a captcha.

Ask for name and date of birth. Voila, no scraping.

With the current state of PII leaks, I'm not so sure.

Hmm.. hold my, no wait.. take my beer.