I mostly agree with the post's author on the "I'm just automating something I'd otherwise be doing manually". If the local weather service publishes, say, barometric charts on their site - but has a TOS that prohibits me from scraping, and my alternative was to just hit their site every day and right-click and save-as on the chart - I feel absolutely no compunction in automating that. You need to be careful of the slippery slope though, when it's easy to grab every day's local barometric chart, it become too easy to think "Hey, I just need to stick that in a loop and I can grab 1000 different charts every day!". I'd personally _not_ do that. If it's something I'm likely to do "by hand" but would occasionally miss a day or three, I'll automate it no matter what the TOS says.