This reminds me of a simlar situation that the last company I worked for was in. We grabbed item content from several well established online vendors - some vendors would send us their item data, but some would refuse to so. For the ones that refused, well, we got their goods anyways - via a web bot (and Parse::RecDescent and some queue daemons).

Personally, I see nothing wrong with this, simply because that information was made public by the vendor themselves. You just have to navigate through their web site to get the info - why not have a bot do it for you?

I think the main reason that Amazon (oops, I mean Vendor X) didn't want to just give us the data was because it would require them to hire/delegate someone to do the task.

But we were all a little concerned that maybe we were stepping over the line of intellectual property. In the end, Vendor X (or any of the other non-participating vendors) never contacted us with a cease and desist warning.

I have always been a subscriber to "if someone makes data they own publically available, then it should be publicly maleable" - meaning that bots can grab data and do what every the heck you want to with it - just as long as that data is not copyrighted. If you have to crack a password to get the data, it's not legal.

Jeff