I think that web scraping is usually understood as the act of extracting information of a website for ulterior self-centered motives. However, it is clear that this ulterior motive cannot be assessed by a website owner. Only the observable behaviour of a data collecting process can be categorized as morally good or bad.
While the bad behaving people are usually also the ones with morally wrong motives, one doesn't entail the other. I chose to qualify the bad behaving ones as scrapers, and the good behaving ones as crawlers.
That being said, the author is perhaps concerned by the growing amount of collecting process, which carries a toll on his server, and thus chose to simply penalize them all.
Unless you define "scrape" to be inherently nefarious - then surely they are? Isn't the definition of a web crawler based on scraping websites?
I think that web scraping is usually understood as the act of extracting information of a website for ulterior self-centered motives. However, it is clear that this ulterior motive cannot be assessed by a website owner. Only the observable behaviour of a data collecting process can be categorized as morally good or bad. While the bad behaving people are usually also the ones with morally wrong motives, one doesn't entail the other. I chose to qualify the bad behaving ones as scrapers, and the good behaving ones as crawlers.
That being said, the author is perhaps concerned by the growing amount of collecting process, which carries a toll on his server, and thus chose to simply penalize them all.