That doesn't change anything. The site owner decides what you can and cannot do. If a badly made API meant you could do anything you wanted to then everything could be done to those sites running them. That is not how this work. Outside normal usage you need permission.

I really don't believe "The site owner decides what you can and cannot do." statement. What is the base of this? This does not seem to apply to anything in the real world.

In most cases you have very limited ability to decide what other people cannot do. And other people has mostly infinite choices of what they can do. I never heard anything as broad as you said. What you said is like a person standing on the street with a T-shirt says "do not look at me more than twice" and claim it has a legal binding to the whole world.

> I really don't believe "The site owner decides what you can and cannot do." statement. What is the base of this? This does not seem to apply to anything in the real world.

It kind of does though; if I own a store and say that only people with hats can enter, then I'm free to do so. Silly? Yes. Legal? Also yes.

There are some circumstances where it's not legal, mostly centred around discrimination. Details on this differ per jurisdiction, but generally speaking you have a right to refuse customers.

Interesting discussion.

To me it seems sending a http request is somewhere inbetween looking (legal) and entering (illegal if not permitted).

However, most important is that the web as a system makes positive interactions easy and negative difficult. We have already found some set of constraints achieving this for interactions in public city streets. But it's not obvious the same rules (that we have internalized) have the same effect in another medium of communication.

If I can access the information in Chrome, I should be able to access the information with my own client, and the site operator shouldn't have any say in that.