If you put something on a public site it can be harvested, and there's really no stopping that. It's like video DRM: you can spend billions on the tech, but ult

If you put something on a public site it can be harvested, and there's really no stopping that. It's like video DRM: you can spend billions on the tech, but ultimately, if nothing else, anyone can still aim any camera at the screen and make a copy. There's only two reasons I can think of that companies would bother with this: 1) they are ignorant or delusional about it and think they can beat the crawler (which could be a third party making money by convincing them they can do it) 2) It forces the crawler to spend more money chasing their blocking I'm not sure what the benefit of 2 would be, though, unless you could make them spend so much money that their entire operation is unprofitable. Aside, as a developer, it might actually be entertaining for a while to work on (2) - constantly changing strategy to defeat scrapers - but I can also see getting burned out pretty quickly.