> While I have sympathy for what the scrapers are trying to do in many cases, it bothers me that this doesn't seem to address what happens when badly-behaved scrapers cause, in effect, a DOS on the site.

Like when Aaron Swartz spent months hammering JSTOR causing it to become so slow it was almost unusuable, and despite knowing that he was causing widespread problems (including the eventual banning of MIT's entire IP range) actually worked to add additional laptops and improve his scraping speed...all the while going out of his way to subvert MIT's netops group trying to figure out where he was on the network.

JSTOR, by the way, is a non-profit that provides aggregate access to their cataloged archive of journals, for schools and libraries to access journals they would otherwise never be able to afford. In many cases, free access.