> Instead you begin feeding plausible, but wrong data (like, add a random number to price). This will usually cause much more damage to the scraper than blocking would.
Honest question, would this open the site up to legal liability?
You can never identify a bot 100%, so if you intentionally provided false information to an otherwise legitimate user, and that user is harmed by your false information, isn't that a breach of contract that would make you liable for damages based on the harm your bad data caused?
What if the user claimed that the site was acting maliciously, providing lower prices to cause a market reaction ala what happened to coinmarketcap? How would you prove that you were only targeting bots or provide statistics that your methods were effective instead of arbitrary. That stuff matters when money is lost.
You'd have to have a clause in your terms of service that says "if we think you are a bot then the information we give you will be bad", then users could (and probably should) run far away, since they have no way of knowing whether you think they are a bot or not, and thus can't trust anything on your site?
if you intentionally provided false information to an otherwise legitimate user, and that user is harmed by your false information, isn't that a breach of contract that would make you liable for damages based on the harm your bad data caused?
Terms of service. It is not considered a contract if you are just an anonymous user, but once you take an affirmative action like creating an account you're explicitly agreeing to that and they are legally binding. The parent comment did not specify anonymous and plenty of bots create accounts to scrape with.
But even aside from the explicit contractual terms, even without one, you cannot just run around acting in bad faith, right? If you put up a site called AccuratePrices.com and then for some users you knowingly and intentionally provide false information, isn't that something like fraud?
Short answer is, they never were. You can't just leave a contract around and say that anyone who gets nearby and/or reads it is now bound by it. It requires some type of affirmative act to acknowledge that you read and understand the contract and are voluntarily entering into a formal relationship. That's what that "I have read and agree to the terms of service" checkbox on most sites is for.
Otherwise I could leave a piece of paper in a coffee shop saying. "Apple stock will go up 5% in the next month - By reading these words you agree not to trade Apple stock in the next month unless you pay me a royalty.". Reading something does not mean agreeing to its terms and if the content does not require agreeing to its terms to access the content, then the terms are may as well not exist until you do.
It doesn't mean you can ignore everything there. If you reproduce the content then you are still liable under copyright laws. If you DDOS the site, you are still liable under tortious interference laws.
But outside of something covered by other laws, there is no legal recourse to just putting "no bots" in your terms of service and then suing any bots you find. You can try to _block_ bots, just like you can hide your sheet of paper when you see a cop getting coffee, but you can't sue them for breaking terms they never agreed to. I don't believe there is actually any case law yet as to whether a bot can even agree to a contract. For evidence you can look at the recent LinkedIn case, which, while it is on appeal, turned on this issue.
Honest question, would this open the site up to legal liability?
You can never identify a bot 100%, so if you intentionally provided false information to an otherwise legitimate user, and that user is harmed by your false information, isn't that a breach of contract that would make you liable for damages based on the harm your bad data caused?
What if the user claimed that the site was acting maliciously, providing lower prices to cause a market reaction ala what happened to coinmarketcap? How would you prove that you were only targeting bots or provide statistics that your methods were effective instead of arbitrary. That stuff matters when money is lost.
You'd have to have a clause in your terms of service that says "if we think you are a bot then the information we give you will be bad", then users could (and probably should) run far away, since they have no way of knowing whether you think they are a bot or not, and thus can't trust anything on your site?