5M to protect against scraping? That sounds... a bit much, no? 34 employees with that one task for 2 years doesn't sound believable to me. Why is WorldCat worth anything anyway?
Defendants, through the Anna’s Archive domains, have made, and continue to make, all 2.2 TB of WorldCat® data available for public download through its torrents,” OCLC wrote in the complaint it filed in an Ohio federal court.
Seriously... I've downloaded 2TB in a week before.
I get that it's not about the bandwidth, though; it's about needing to upgrade their security since they scraped the site without needing to log in, so obviously their site wasn't secure. They're claiming IT costs as damages.
They should have had security in place beforehand if they didn't want people to scrape their site. If AA hadn't done it someone else would have. Don't make it public if you don't want people to use it.