Not OP, but I find that the ethical questions tend to not be about web scraping itself and more what you are using it to accomplish. If you want to scrape and r

Not OP, but I find that the ethical questions tend to not be about web scraping itself and more what you are using it to accomplish. If you want to scrape and rehost some data then your ethical violation is in the copying and rehosting, not that you automated the downloading of data. It would be the same if you copied all the data by hand and then rehosted it. Then, of course, the way you go about it is important, too. Sapping the resources and bandwidth of a small site by sending it thousands of requests a minute is very different from automatically checking a public index once an hour.