Chrome does automatically download webpages: it supports prefetching and iframes.
Not only is it up to judges and lawyers but there's >190 juresdictions in which you could be sued. There are more important things to worry about, such as heart disease.
This begs the questions;
- At what point does web-scraping become research?
- Is it considered scraping if a human is actioning it (no automation)?
- Could I manually click links and copy the data from the browser, is this scraping?
There's no strict definition, so it's up to a judges and lawyers to decide what the definitions entail...