You're supporting making it hard for people to export their data just because you don't like Posterous' tone?
If the load is causing problems for TwitPic, they should tell Posterous to increase the delay between requests when they're importing data. I doubt this is the case.
No I didn't say that: I support sensible ways of data export. I run websites myself and I know how a badly written scraper can affect performance. And as a user, I want full control of my data.
So the solution is to have both parties figure out how to transfer the data large amounts of data without affecting overall performance. It's a matter of being polite on both sides, and Posterous started the rudeness with this lame campaign, thus losing their moral high ground IMHO. Bringing in the lawyers is a bit blunt, but IMHO it's 100% Twitpic's right.
Service like Twitpic can actually protect themselves from this kind of problem by having APIs for data export, with the APIs having clear rate limiting and other specs any importer needs to adhere to. Then the lawyers are not needed and if the spec is breached, no one can complain if Twitpic blocks them.
The chances of Twitpic's performance being harmed by this are slim to none. I don't care about Twitpic being rude to Posterous, but Twitpic is being rude to its users.
If the load is causing problems for TwitPic, they should tell Posterous to increase the delay between requests when they're importing data. I doubt this is the case.