You need to be careful sending bogus data: in some jurisdictions this could be argued to be deliberate targeted commercial sabotage. You would no doubt eventually win any resulting legal argument, assuming you could afford to carry the argument on to that conclusion. Sending no data, or limited data, would be safe though.
A better method would be to set "default" pricing (something high but not ridiculous, that could easily be negotiated downwards if they contact you) and make access beyond a few requests a click-through (or better: have them respond to an email before progressing further) where they agree to that pricing if they are using the information commercially.
The problem I see is with giving out bad data while leading people to believe they have obtained useful information (that they then embarrass themselves by using/re-distributing).
I did misread the grand-parent post though: his was suggesting the bogus data was the message, and I read it as handing out fake data for the scraper along with the message to be seen should a human be looking.
Yeah I can see why fake data could give you a harder time in terms of lawsuits. Similar to people who fight hotlinking of their content by replacing images with something offensive.
>"You need to be careful sending bogus data: in some jurisdictions this could be argued to be deliberate targeted commercial sabotage." //
That sounds pretty ludicrous, do you have anything to back it up - caselaw, settlement report? It would be analagous to serving a fake image to combat hotlinking; or a fake page to combat framing.
Something that is obviously fake or otherwise different (like the image or frame break-out examples) would also be fine.
But leading someone to believe they have correct data when what they have is potentially embarrassing when used could be something they'd take objection to. Even if not there are two other points of risk: your reputation if something goes wrong and you accidentally give bad data to your paying clients and your reputation if someone, paying or otherwise, shows off the bad data as "the sort crap these people try to sell".
I don't have any specific references, but it is something I would be careful of as there have certainly been similarly ludicrous (IMO) cases on unrelated matters in the past (yes the right side would win, assuming they can afford to).
I may be being too cynical here, then again maybe not...
I did misread the grand-parent post though and this isn't what he was talking about. He was suggesting the bogus data was the message, and I read it as handing out fake data for the scraper along with the message to be seen should a human be looking.
Hasn't the mapping industry already set a precedent in this field? They provide maps with small, wrong roads/trails specifically to identify who is stealing their data.
Pretty much, but precedents set in the "real world" don't always carry over to "on the Internet", even when the correlation is stark, obvious, and indisputable to most people's eyes.
