If we want to take the unethical route, I’d argue not providing an API (paid or free) is unethical and a nasty business practice.

I work for an ecommerce company and we scrape competitors for price information. Should this automated process using API’s not be okay, we’ll have humans do it. Less efficient for us, more traffic for a competitor. Should they provide a paid API with price information available, I’m sure we’d pay.