I don’t think it’s grey. It seems to be legal as the data are made freely available and the only grey part is that companies don’t want this to happen and would rather charge and not have people scrape.
Many municipalities charge for copies of public records. One can go to viewing rooms and examine the records at no charge. We all own those records as members of the public that funded them, and the place where they are kept.
Many municipalities want to prohibit photography because people taking their own picture of a public record does not involve the copy fee.
The municipality confuses access to records as a part of their fee, and that is where attempts to limit photography come from.
The fee actually funds the work necessary for an official copy to be made, optionally stamped to be admissible in court or accepted as an "original copy."
A photocopy of a death certificate is no different than the one the city clerk made, except for the stamp and clerk being able to testify about making the record copy.
Some companies and government agencies will accept a death cert no matter what. Others want an official copy.
Getting back to scraping:
Clearly people have access and can make their own data copies.
Maybe the answer is for companies to make official data products available, or something along those lines.
That's why I think it's still a gray area. But I could be wrong -- I haven't been following this stuff all that closely.
You don’t need consensus to allow something, you need consensus to be against something, otherwise it’s allowed.
This “scraping is Grey” sounds like FUD to me. Legally, you can scrape anything publicly available as long as you damage the server. You understand that google is just a giant web scraper right?
And all the other search engines spidering the web. Do you think they are risking their business being in the “grey?”
"Only three claims remained for the final order - the violation of the CAN-SPAM Act, violation of the CFAA and California Penal Code.
The district court then granted summary judgment to Facebook on all three of the remaining Facebook claims. The district court awarded statutory damages of $3,031,350"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventur....
I think there’s no grey area for whether scraping publicly available data is legal as it is legal.