The source here is CEO of a company trying to sell content protection solutions for the web.

Yes - our CEO wrote the post. I'm an employee at the company and posted the link to the blog. Regardless of what service we sell, we thought that the points the article discussed were important and time appropriate with everything happening in the news.

Looking for a poll, anyone think webscraping is the same thing as hacking?

I'm not sure how you define hacking. Web-scraping is not gaining unauthorized access to an otherwise inaccessible system. Anything you can see with your eyes in a browser is out in the open. And you can adjust a scraper's schedule to be mostly indistinguishable from human browsing habits.

That is, if a web-scraper can be reasonably indistinguishable from a human, then certainly we can't say web-scraping is illegal across the board.

I guess that was a poorly phrased question. Auernheimer was convicted of "conspiracy to access a computer without authorization" so more specifically, is web scraping the same thing as "conspiracy to access a computer without authorization"?

Web scrapers look just like real humans, and its publicly available data, so when a website doesnt authorize web scrapers, how do you draw a legal differentiations?

Depends on what the meaning of the word hacking is.

I think GP means "Cracking".

If your name is AT&T, then the answer is yes.

And if you work for AT&T its another grey area.