So what's the maximum penalty for trespassing? The prosecution was looking for a disproportionate sentence

About technical countermeasures to evade blocking.. you realize that everybody that does scraping at a large scale employs those, right? Including Meta

Specially nowadays where large swaths of the web is behind captchas

If it was charged as trespassing, not something higher like burglary, then the level of his trespass was probably the lowest misdemeanor. Usually trespass is a sliding scale starting with a warning not to return.

Being that it was on a campus, they can sometimes use that as an aggravating factor. I remember one case where a homeless person had a key for a vending machine and took out $30 in quarters, but since the land the vending machine was on was owned by a university he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. One of the few cases that got reversed for a constitutionally exceptional sentence.