Janet, I like your style, I think I will enjoy the attempted thrashing by you 
But you know, I think it would very cool if you were to answer my question first.
“What is the problem?”
If like you said,
Then every honest hard working Webmaster would be beating the hell out of the scrapers and no one would have any problems with scraping… But we all know that is not the case.
Janet I do not disagree with you about building good sites, it really is the only way to go. I just disagree that building a good site is ALL you can do to protect yourself.
As for my plan of action. Well… I do not intend to sit around and cry about someone stealing my content or attacking my site (well actually I will whine and bitch about it a lot and I do mean a lot… I just can’t help myself). But I also intend to continue to take whatever actions I can to protect my property from attack and theft.
BTW – Make no mistake, the current scraping attempt by 888 on all the sites that blacklisted them is an attack and not just some lame attempted theft.
Simple things like blocking all but known and approved bots from your site and block any browsers that act like a bot. There is no one single solution, a combination of actions are required. Protect your site first, then there are things you can do like reporting the scrapers to the affiliate programs, search engines, their ISP or their Host if they are using a Hosting company and report phony domain registrations. These things are all a pain in the ass and they take time and some effort but they do work when used in concert… most of the time. There are also several places like CAP where these scumbags and their actions can be brought to public attention and people can work together to stomp out these parasites (kinda like we are doing now).
Then if all these actions fail… I personally like to turn down the lights and take the gloves off… and no I am not going to discuss what I mean by that. 