[BlewisJS]

I agree it's a strong word, which is why I said borderline nefarious. However, it's not that far off from a DDOS tool.

At least in the United States, sounds like the jury is still out on the legality: https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-supreme-court-revives-..., but my perspective was more from an ethics standpoint anyway.

[paxys]

It is very far from a DDOS tool. Scraping can be done from a single source, one request at a time, with self imposed rate limits. Sure it can overwhelm a server, but then so can a single user opening 10 tabs.

[conductr]

> Scraping can be done from a single source

That's not what this tool does though. It allows you to distribute your scraping to a layer of proxies. So, the only difference is whether there is an intent to do harm to the target or merely collect data... which could be a form of doing harm as well?

[codazoda]

Based on another comment, and the wikipedia article they linked to, it looks like the Supreme Court vacated the decision and remanded the case for further review in June 2021 (probably after this article).[1] Unfortunately there is no citation for that sentence so I'm not entirely sure.

I think that means the jury is still out, as you mentioned, but it's leaning towards scraping being legal as long as the data is publicly available. IANAL

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn