> I think of web scraping as nothing less than automation of human work.

I agree that scraping should be allowed. We wouldn't have Google otherwise.

However, there's something to be said for the fact that some activities are okay at a small scale but become problematic at a large scale—particularly the scale which becomes possible when a task is automated.

For instance, I recently bought an expensive camera and have been having fun walking around the city and taking interesting photos. Many of the photos have people in them. I don't think there's any harm in this.

I store my photos in Aperture, which automatically performs facial recognition on everything in my library. Perhaps some day, if I take enough pictures, Aperture will notice that the same stranger is present in two completely different images. That might be kind of cool—I can see myself fancifully trying to imagine this person's life story. I don't think there would be any harm in that, either.

However, if I aggregated millions of photos from different sources, and used them to track people's movements across the city, that would clearly be a huge problem! Sure, it would be merely automating the work a human could do, but the scale just changes everything!