While true, it shouldn't be. It's only this way because our laws are broken such that companies with a lot of money can intimidate upstarts by threatening to sue over their extraction of public, non-copyrightable data. It's even worse than the already-draconian copyright restrictions that are also used to shore up entrenched players at the expense of innovators, since the law is often interpreted to mean that you can't download any data at all, regardless of its copyright status (even if the data is owned by the user, and they're asking you to extract that data on their behalf), without the prior written consent of the company that runs the server. If a company decides they don't want you to access their server anymore, they claim trademark infringement, copyright infringement, tortious interference, and trespass to chattels, and unless you have tens of millions just sitting around that you wanted to spend on lawyers this year, you're SOL. It obviously shouldn't be that way, and the world would be a joke if the same rules were applied to non-digital resources.
If anyone has a real answer to this legal problem, please let me know. The EFF hasn't been taking it on.