"illegal"? Under what law?
"this scraping violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the controversial 1986 law that makes computer hacking a crime. HiQ sued, asking courts to rule that its activities did not, in fact, violate the CFAA."
If you don't want it read, take it down.
First, the scraper consumes a lot more bandwidth (which some websites might have real trouble with). Second, the aggregated scraped data is a lot more valuable than what any single person receives from reading a few pages.
Websites could (and sometimes do) limit the number of views and the frequency of accesses from the same IP, which allows users to read the page and discourages scrapers without "taking it down".
Anyone can make a LinkedIn account, ergo anyone can scrape any public profile.
The EFF said this, so they seem to agree that it set a bad precedent, even for those just scraping.
"Under the government's theory, anyone who disregards – or doesn't read – the terms of service on any website could face computer crime charges," said EFF civil liberties director Jennifer Granick in a press release at the time. "Price-comparison services, social network aggregators and users who skim a few years off their ages could all be criminals if the government prevails."
This is false. Web pages expect scrapers to respect robots.txt and users to respect the terms and conditions. From what I understand, the CFAA law was not meant for these violations, and the fight is whether or not this law can be used to win the trial. However, other laws can be put into place to address these situations.
I agree that what you say is the only sensible way to look at things.
If you have permission for one thing it doesn't mean you have permission for something different.