suggests there is little to no recourse for IMDB and the likes. Craigslist was able to win their case against 3taps, arguing the scraping was putting a load on their servers (typical Craig Newman bullshit) and that they continued scraping even after the IP ban and that is a computer frauds act or something like that which is draconian response likes of which that guy who killed himself because he got caught for scraping academic journals.
IMDb forbids scrapers in their conditions[1] but you can freely download their datasets[2].
Similar to what you described: omdbapi[3] is a third party API for the free IMDb data.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/conditions
[2] https://datasets.imdbws.com/
[3] http://www.omdbapi.com/