Commercial web scraping - is it stealing?

Aren't sites able to prevent this type of thing through a prominent terms of use link on every page? (Ticketmaster 2003, Cairo v. CrossMedia Services)<p>Is it that this is still a legal gray area, or is it that big companies can roll over small companies and individuals?<p>Ticketmaster - <a href="http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Ticketmaster_v._Tickets.com" rel="nofollow">http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Ticketmaster_v._Tickets.com</a><p>Cairo v. CossMedia - <a href="http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Cairo_v._CrossMedia_Services" rel="nofollow">http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Cairo_v._CrossMedia_Services</a>

There's a lot to be concerned about here for anyone who provides a data mining backed web application or service.<p>At PatientsLikeMe patients are trading use of their information for free access to data analysis tools and social community.

It's almost always going to violate the site's TOS, so if you're a business that depends on regularly scraping sites without permission, prepare to change your business model or be sued. (eg. Octopart vs Mouser and Digikey)

So, when are we going to get a law making it illegal to violate robots.txt?