"Artists and authors aren't going after the library for copyright concerns the same way they go after torrent sites."
> They might if the library would share everything digitally, which would directly compete with the artist's own marketing efforts
"Websites don't go after big search indexers like Google and Bing but will and can sue local scrapers who never entered some type of agreement with the website."
> They don't go after Google because they (supposedly) make something out of getting scraped
I swear I've heard libraries rent out books for e-readers. I might be way off in my memory though as I don't keep up with those types of things (or libraries).
Isn't getting scraped by Google voluntary with the robots.txt?
Also a question for anyone who knows the answer: does Google/Bing/etc use the same amount of resources as someone using whatever to scrape a website (bandwidth, whatever else websites might be concerned with)? Genuinely curious as I don't have much experience scraping and even less dealing with crawlers.
I swear I've heard libraries rent out books for e-readers
At least in Sweden, e-books are licensed to libraries under an entirely different set of rules, and as such it costs the library a lot more when you 'borrow' and e-book than when you borrow an actual book. The result of this is that libraries have been forced to limit the number of e-books people can borrow pr. month.
Any scraper will use essentially the same bandwidth (varying slightly on how much content they actually download). Their can be issues with server load depending on how fast you are getting indexed and how much content your site has, but Google takes care to detect this and you can also manually reduce the speed / schedule via Webmaster Tools.
"Websites don't go after big search indexers like Google and Bing but will and can sue local scrapers who never entered some type of agreement with the website." > They don't go after Google because they (supposedly) make something out of getting scraped