"but how is it stealing when one does not lose inventory?"
Scraping is not necessarily a no-victim situation. Even today after this stuff has gotten cheaper, you're costing them bandwidth fees, and likely increasing their server storage and CPU fees if it's on a metered hosting service, which is quite likely nowadays. If you degrade their site's functionality, you may chase away paying customers.
We need not hypothesize crazy third-order effects; you are taking money out of their pockets by the act of scraping itself, independent of the question of the value of the content.
"What about Google? etc." - robots.txt-honoring scrapers that don't hammer the sites at least have a plausible claim to permission. Scrapers are quite likely to be ignoring the robots.txt.
> Scraping is not necessarily a no-victim situation. Even today after this stuff has gotten cheaper, you're costing them bandwidth fees, and likely increasing their server storage and CPU fees if it's on a metered hosting service, which is quite likely nowadays. If you degrade their site's functionality, you may chase away paying customers.
While technically correct, you are conflating the issues, because in none of the cases (that I've seen mentioned so far in this thread) the problem is with bandwidth/storage/CPU costs of retrieval to any significant extent.
Instead, it appears that almost all of the costs are incurred before retrieval: curating, sorting, etc.
I'm not arguing that it's okay, but it's just as much not stealing / thievery as downloading movies or music isn't.
Scraping is not necessarily a no-victim situation. Even today after this stuff has gotten cheaper, you're costing them bandwidth fees, and likely increasing their server storage and CPU fees if it's on a metered hosting service, which is quite likely nowadays. If you degrade their site's functionality, you may chase away paying customers.
We need not hypothesize crazy third-order effects; you are taking money out of their pockets by the act of scraping itself, independent of the question of the value of the content.
"What about Google? etc." - robots.txt-honoring scrapers that don't hammer the sites at least have a plausible claim to permission. Scrapers are quite likely to be ignoring the robots.txt.