"Black" Hat Google Scraping

As we all well know it's against the google ToS to scrape their results.

While I'm confident in my programming abilities to mask the fact that I'm sending automated queries, I plan to launch a (paid) program that will allow you to more easily track your rankings yourself.

My concern is getting a C&D from google for selling the program. So, what defenses do I have against them doing that?

Are there hosting companies that won't turn over my information? Are there country specific laws that would allow me to sell this program if I license my company there?

I'm a one man show so I will likely not be able to afford a legal team, or any legal anything for that matter, if they decide to come after me. What suggestions would you have for making sure that they can't do that?

There are tons of softwares that do this already... let the user process the requests from their PC. There choice not to use proxy or not and result in a blacklist not yours. I am not a lawyer

Right, but what options do I have to protect myself from google sending me a cease and desist?

Interesting question. I always wondered how websites like spyfu, keywordspy or keycompete get away with that.

On of the IM guru types released a software that scraped the top 10 url results in google, yahoo and bing when you entered a certain keyword.

Trey Smith was his name i believe.

My point is that I am sure it will be ok. Although I am not a lawyer.

What if we backed up a little bit and considered sites like craigslist or yahoo answers too. What could we do to protect ourselves if we wanted to do something like take craigslist ads and put adsense blocks next to them on our own site?

That's totally against the craigslist ToS, but is there a place where we could go where the country/law/website host could make us pretty much invulnerable to cease and desist orders?

User agreements and the law are two different things. Nothing will happen to you.

There IS a case going on right now involving a company that automated stuff on ticketmaster that could change all that, but this is the first time it's happened.

I decided to go with godaddy initially for my site, but keep regular backups and keep the database with an entirely different host, so if I get C&Ded then I won't loose any data. I'll make sure that they can't take my domain, but I don't mind hopping hosting for the static info and scripts. It is black hat after all. =)

I'll go to the pirate bay's host possibly if godaddy shuts me down unless people have other suggestions....