I used to have a similar attitude - most typically applied to rules & laws, etc. “If you don’t like the rule, go run for office and get the law changed.”
But then I realized that’s just a cop out. A lot of structures and systems are in place specifically to make it difficult for people to change things and specifically to maintain monopolies.
Nobody’s going to lobby government to resolve this issue. That’s the point. Real estate companies are super happy to keep the status quo.
Sometimes you have to break some rules to innovate. There is a line of course (where you draw it depends on your own ethical code). But I certainly wouldn’t put “scraping real estate data” behind the line.
Scraping a website in your analog analogy would be a store where those index cards would be plastered to the shop’s windows, visible from the outside. The “scraper” would come by every day and manually copy (as in, write in their own notebook) what was on those index cards that are visible from the street.
So the question is: would you consider that stealing?
It's more like you going to the public library to borrow every single book they have. Thereby forcing the library staff to handle all your requests. You would probably not expect to be allowed to do this in real life.
Stop trying to lawyer this through analigies people, think about the actual situation at hand, instead of drawing broken parallels to some hypothetical
But then I realized that’s just a cop out. A lot of structures and systems are in place specifically to make it difficult for people to change things and specifically to maintain monopolies.
Nobody’s going to lobby government to resolve this issue. That’s the point. Real estate companies are super happy to keep the status quo.
Sometimes you have to break some rules to innovate. There is a line of course (where you draw it depends on your own ethical code). But I certainly wouldn’t put “scraping real estate data” behind the line.