Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but in making the request, you will provide information on who is making that request. If you say, "I am a bot!", and they grant you permission, your request is legal. But if you say, 'I am NOT a bot', like spoofing a browser's user agent string, but you are a bot, then you are requesting access under a pretense, in order to circumvent their terms of service. Kinda feels morally wrong, and illegal.
That argument works, insofar as it does, only for more recognizable bots and browsers. If I write a client of some sort that identifies itself as: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Snackmaster Pro/666.0.666 What do you do? I also tell my browser to lie about what it is sometimes, due to sites that are malfunctioning, but whose owners choose to document the errors instead of fixing th…
If by client you mean a robot, then you are pretending to be a browser and you are accessing the service without permission.
Let me ask you a question, say your client was hitting my service with that user agent, 100 times a second, crawling through urls sequentionaly. Lets say I added it to my robots.txt deny list and starting blocking that user agent. Would you change the user agent and continue?
If someone creates a site that says, 'Access to this site is for 640x480 browsers only, any other use is forbidden'. Then I think its pretty clear that its a stupid site but also that faking your screen resolution is accessing a site without consent. There is no slope, someone (Linkedin) putting explicit terms on their website is pretty clear.