> If you don't want bots loading your website and scraping it, make an API so that they can easily access the information they want.

Precisely. While scraping competitor sites for pricing info etc is exactly as sleazy as it sounds, I have no qualms about scraping in certain situations. A couple that spring to mind:

- Where the site's UI is so dumb that it doesn't let me do what any reasonable person might naturally want to do (this would be the case in the original article)

- Where it's a govt. site and the data is only trickled out through some 90's era search function. Taxpayers paid for the collection of that data, taxpayers pay for its storage etc - give the taxpayers an API to access it!