> the law handles these kinds of things just fine

No, people just like to claim that it does. Meanwhile legal departments are risk averse, so if nobody can articulate where the line is, you're banning all of the things you claim you're not banning. Even if a judge might ultimately come to a reasonable decision, do you want to be the one who pays the legal fees to "win" that case?

> The flesh doesn't know the difference between manslaughter and murder but we humans can figure it out well enough.

The reason things like this aren't a practical problem is that normal people can avoid needing to care about the distinction by endeavoring to not kill anyone to begin with. On top of that, the law actually does have some pretty specific rules about the distinction between manslaughter and murder.

Whereas the trouble here is that we need to distinguish between things that we specifically don't want to deter and something else which is proposed to be prohibited. The type of law that handles that kind of distinction most frequently is the tax code. The consequence is that it has to be made very specific or the result is a train wreck.

Exactly.

> a stealth bot to access a website, digital platform, or online service in a manner that is reasonably likely to damage, impair, or burden the technical or commercial operation of a website or other internet service

"stealth" - what does that mean? This is largely a meaningless term. "damage, impair, or burden" - again, too vague. It would be good to specify something specific, e.g. so many tens of thousand of damage (reciprocal to the assumed fine - a journalist or user is unlikely to be reselling data at this scale, an AI scraper may incur or inflict such costs). "that is reasonably likely to" - this phrase is doing some heavy, heavy lifting, but like others have mentioned, there aren't very many "reasonable" examples, and those have to be defined in a court of law.

Like you and others have said, the immediate reaction would be legal departments essentially banning any and all access, because there would be room for someone to file a suit, and even if you win, there's no guarantee you get your fees back...