No. In the United States, something must meet a standard of originality to qualify for copyright protection. [0] While certain arrangements of facts may be copyrighted, the factual information itself cannot be owned by anyone.

The facts in a list of facts, like the fact that there is a home for rent at a specific address and the landlord wants $x per month from potential tenants, cannot be copyrighted by anyone, certainly not a middleman like Craigslist. It is free information that anyone in the world may use as they like. The law is written that way, the courts have ruled that way. This is true of information in books, on billboards, flyers, CD-ROMs, whatever. It's only a technicality in the delivery mechanism that makes it any different when the information is read from a page retrieved by HTTP.

You gave the example of a phone book, which is unfortunate for you because that very example has been litigated in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. [1] and the assertions you're making were ruled incorrect. It was ruled that it is perfectly legal to copy the facts out of a phone book, rearrange them, and republish the content. This was argued all the way up to the Supreme Court. Remember that you believe "judges do a terrific job, especially in the higher courts".

As you point out, there is no practical difference between copying out of a phone book or a web page for practical purposes. The reason one is legal and one is illegal is because of the obtuse wording of the CFAA and the technical ignorance of the judiciary, especially in the precedent-setting cases that were decided a decade or more ago, as the internet was still emerging as a force in American life.

>If Craigslist have sent you a letter by legally-certified mail telling you to stop scraping rent pricing information off their site, then it makes you both an asshole and a criminal if you keep doing it.

On what basis? We've already established there is no copyright interest in the factual data (though there may be in the exact wording of the ad, if only non-copyrightable factual data is extracted, there is no infringement).

Should it be illegal for me to read a book that I legally acquired just because the publisher sent me a letter and told me he didn't like what I was doing with the information I learned from it? Am I an asshole if I read a book by a politician and go on TV to talk about how I disagree with something he said therein? Should I be under either criminal or moral indictment for doing so?

The publisher must take responsibility for widely and publicly disseminating the information. If you don't want some people to know certain things, you shouldn't publish and then sell tens of thousands of books that contain that information. In the same way, if you're worried about what someone else may do when they learn that the house at 129 Main St is currently on the market, perhaps you shouldn't tell everyone.

Legally, the difference only exists because the internet works by pulling a copy of the web page from a server. That shouldn't matter most of the time, which, again, you already indicated.

>Or you could be unintentionally denying their legitimate users service by overloading their servers.

I agree that there should be reasonable civil liability for causing accidental DoS attacks. That's fine. The law should be amended so that it only covers this, not so that it covers normal information retrieval from the internet.

>And yes, the 'temporary' copy in my camera's SD card would constitute copyright infringement.

The correct analogy for a copy in RAM is the copy of the image that is reflected onto your retinas when you look at the copyrighted work, not a permanent storage device from which the content is eventually deleted. Every judge in the world would scoff if someone tried to claim that anyone who looked at his work owed him for the "infringing copy" that existed in their eyeballs, but because judges don't understand how computers or RAM work, they make decisions they'd scoff at if they knew what was really going on. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster,_LLC_v._RMG_Techn....