I disagree. DOSing a site is bad behaviour, regardless of how you do this. But accessing it in an automated way instead of a browser? Not really. The deal on the Internet is like this: a website owner can provide whatever they want, and a visitor can read it however they want. Discriminating visitors based on whether or not they seem to be bots instead of people is going beyond what the site provider should do. So is detecting and blocking people using adblockers.
I agree with your assertion about "the deal on the Internet", but I disagree with your conclusions. IMO, site owners should be able to discriminate all they want. However, when someone's browser (or other software...) makes a request to that site, and the site serves them some data, the user should be able to do with that what they will: either honor or decline the requests for them to download various ads or JavaScript, for instance. It should be up to the site owner to craft their site to follow their policies and whims. What I'm completely against is the idea of using the government and law enforcement to enforce some site owner's policies. The only exception I can see for this is extreme cases where this general principle falls down: DOS attacks, for instance.
If I can modify my web browser to view a site, but skip the ads, that should be my right. If the site owner codes their site to detect this and then blocks my request to see their site, that should be their right. If I modify my ad-blocker to get around their ad-blocker-block, that should be my right, and so on. As long as we don't get into something like DDOS territory where a reasonable web site has no good technological way of avoiding the problem caused by a user, this isn't something for government to get involved in.
IMO all's fair as long as the solution is technical. Dragging it into the courts because you can't figure out how to stop them technically (especially if they're not actually disrupting anything) is inappropriate.
We need updated legislation that covers malicious actors that issue DDoS attacks but leaves normal people that scrape consciously and carefully alone.
