1. A website operator must capture your IP address to issue a cease-and-desist or come after you legally. 2. It is 100% legal to mask your IP address when acce

1. A website operator must capture your IP address to issue a cease-and-desist or come after you legally. 2. It is 100% legal to mask your IP address when accessing websites. 3. Always mask your IP address and you will never hear from the website owner. (I'm not condoning anything illegal, and I have public-facing web-servers so I know all about the pain from aggressive bots and scraping. I'm just pointing out the facts around this instead of some vague lawyer's blog post with a "who knows, contact us" at the end of the article.) From the website owner's perspective: 1. I get nailed with bots and scraping all day. If you do something outstandingly stupid and become the signal within the noise: I'm just going to harden my bot detection and mitigation instead of calling up my lawyer. 2. Almost all websites published today are running blind. They have no idea you are a bot, and they are more likely to get excited in the bump in traffic because "of course it's from the money we poured on that marketing effort". 3. If a website has a bot problem, they will recognize your scripts and give you guidelines on how not to be a jerk when scraping their content. This is usually backed up by IP based throttle limits. 4. I'm more afraid of this lawyer's hourly price, not the possibility of damage caused by web-scraping against my servers.