It's pointless to think of it as "wrong" for third-parties to web-scrape. Entities will do as they must to survive. The onus of mitigating web scraping, if in

It's pointless to think of it as "wrong" for third-parties to web-scrape. Entities will do as they must to survive. The onus of mitigating web scraping, if in the interests of the publisher, is on the publisher. As a startup developer, third-party scraping is something I need to be aware of, that I need to defend against if doing so suits my interests. A little bit of research shows that this is not impractical. Dynamic IP restrictions (or slowbanning), rudimentary data watermarking, caching of anonymous request output all mitigate this. Spot-checking popular content by running it through Google Search requires all of five minutes per week. At that point, the specific situation can be addressed holistically (a simple attribution license might make everyone happy). With enough research, one might consider hellbanning the offender (serving bogus content to requests satisfying some certain heuristic) as a deterrent. A legal pursuit with its cost would likely be a last resort. Accept the possibility of being scraped and prepare accordingly.