Web scraping isn't a crime - the simple act of downloading the data should not be a problem here. (The reuse of the data might be, depending, but we don't have that information right now.)
This doesn't even rise to the level of what Weev did.
This doesn't even rise to the level of what Weev did.
I'm not sure whether there is a legal precedent though, in some cases you could call it a denial of service if the requests are not rate limited, and in other cases it might be considered an inappropriate access (see Weev, though he eventually won appeal).
Even calling this "bandwidth theft" is quite the hyperbole—if the server can't handle the bandwidth, then rate limit the requests.
I think if you're serving out pages to the public, you don't really get to tell me what kind of browser I'm allowed to download it with. As long as I'm speaking HTTP, it seems fair.
Sadly, that law has been slowly creeping against this mentality... Lately I feel like I'm some old internet hippy with these views. On a site called "Hacker News", no less.
I guess it's because everyday more and more people on here are finding themselves on the other side of the fence, i.e. finding that some of their users are ripping off their content/site.
Sell a product or service.