I'm often reminded of the fact that in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz the scraped party JSTOR did not desire to press civil charges, but due to the criminal component of the CFAA, this was out of their hands - and the story ended in the worst possible way.
If the current legal landscape at least better restricts disputes over web scraping to civil litigation, it may not be a huge change for how companies look at their risks, but it could make a huge difference for individuals caught in the crossfire.
Scraping Facebook to make a clone of profiles shouldn’t be held to the same scrutiny of scraping Facebook to do an internal analysis of user demographics for research purposes.
You think google bots read contracts before scraping website? really? :) If you had any experience in creating websites and launching them online, you would know how fast and often they arrive and how they do not care about your TOS. So the real 'violation' numbers might be very scary...for you.
https://ironcladapp.com/journal/contract-management/are-brow...
Suppose I point a scraper at site S1, which has terms of service that say scraping them is OK, and my scraper finds a link on S1 to S2 and follows that, and follows a link from S2 to S3, and so on.
At some site Sn far enough down that chain is it really possible to use the scraper accessing that site to infer my intent to accept Sn's contract? The connection between me and Sn seems tenuous enough that it might be hard to even argue that I intended to visit Sn, let alone use that to infer acceptance of their contract.
https://www.zyte.com/blog/van-buren-a-victory-for-web-scrape...
https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2021/06/more-perspecti...
https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2021/06/more-perspecti...
The name of my firm is McCarthy Garber Law. I write about scraping there when I have time (which I rarely do)!
In my opinion, 2021 was a bad year for the law as it relates to web scraping. The Supreme Court remanded hiQ Labs, and many high-profile lower-court cases ended badly for web scrapers. It's a darker shade of gray than it was in 2020. It can be navigated, but it's tricky.