Providing the information on a publicly accessible page provides permission. It's like posting a letter on a public noticeboard and demanding that certain people not read it.
There is a distinction between a person reading one page and a scraper reading all pages.
First, the scraper consumes a lot more bandwidth (which some websites might have real trouble with). Second, the aggregated scraped data is a lot more valuable than what any single person receives from reading a few pages.
Websites could (and sometimes do) limit the number of views and the frequency of accesses from the same IP, which allows users to read the page and discourages scrapers without "taking it down".
not so much "demanding that certain people not read it" but demanding that certain people not take certain action with the information on the notice board.
They were being sentenced to prison but not for scraping, their business were a fraudulent economic activity. They broke the terms of buying those tickets by impersonating legitimate customers. I don't see the connection with scraping.
Hard to say...they were charged with both wire fraud and "hacking" (CFAA).
The EFF said this, so they seem to agree that it set a bad precedent, even for those just scraping.
"Under the government's theory, anyone who disregards – or doesn't read – the terms of service on any website could face computer crime charges," said EFF civil liberties director Jennifer Granick in a press release at the time. "Price-comparison services, social network aggregators and users who skim a few years off their ages could all be criminals if the government prevails."
> If you have permission to view the page, then you have permission to scrape the page.
This is false. Web pages expect scrapers to respect robots.txt and users to respect the terms and conditions. From what I understand, the CFAA law was not meant for these violations, and the fight is whether or not this law can be used to win the trial. However, other laws can be put into place to address these situations.
