There’s a fine line between scrapping and DDOS’ing I’m sure.

Just because you manufacture chemicals doesn’t mean you can legally dump your toxic waste anywhere you want (well shouldn’t be allowed to at least).

You also shouldn’t be able to set your crawlers causing sites to fail.

intent is likely very important to something like a ddos charge

Maybe, but impact can also make a pretty viable case.

For instance, if you own a home you may have an easement on part of your property that grants other cars from your neighborhood access to pass through it rather than going the long way around.

If Amazon were to build a warehouse on one side of the neighborhood, however, it's not obvious that they would be equally legally justified to send their whole fleet back and forth across it every day, even though their intent is certainly not to cause you any discomfort at all.

So is negligence. Or at least I would hope so.

Wilful ignorance is generally enough.

So have the stressor and stress testing DDoS for hire sites changed to scraping yet?

The courts will likely be able to discern between "good faith" scraping and a DDoS for hire masquerading as scraping.

It's like these AI companies have to invent scraping spiders again from scratch. I don't know how often I have been ddosed to complete site failure and still ongoing by random scrapers just the last few months.

If I make a physical robot and it runs someone over, I'm still liable, even though it was a delivery robot, not a running over people robot.

If a bot sends so many requests that a site completely collapses, the owner is liable, even though it was a scraping bot and not a denial of service bot.

The law doesn't work by analogy.

Except when it does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy_(law)

Then you can feed them deliberately poisoned data.

Send all of your pages through an adversarial LLM to pollute and twist the meaning of the underlying data.

The scraper bots can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.