Don’t most websites prohibit someone from scraping and harvesting the data on them? Most recently, I can think of Yelp, Amazon, and GitHub prohibiting this, as well as the Aaron Swartz case.
“Prohibit” is an interesting word that in the world of public web publishing of data is actually pretty meaningless. Certainly companies take measures to prevent bulk scraping when they can detect it and have legal remedies if copyrighted or owned material is republished. But simply telling me I am prohibited to hold on to a copy of your site’s data is pretty meaningless when my browser caches your page and you want…
As a website owner, beyond that, there is no need to tell someone they cannot access your site if you simply block them from accessing your servers instead using a multitude of techniques.
Where does caching come into play at all here? You cannot cache content to begin with if the server is blocking access in the first place. And if you have already cached it in the act of violating said website’s terms of service, then you are still not in compliance.