Key?

So, uh, what's the point of the key exactly? The stated point is that it prevents a person from grabbing someone else's data.

But here's the thing, if I place a script on my web page, the key is now public. So anyone can grab it. And get my data. And I could do the same for other people who put these widgets on their web pages.

Or am I misunderstanding something?

The key identifies the developer who produced the script, just like with Google. It doesn't select the data returned. (Google restricts the referring domain per key, as I assume LT will at some point.)

The point of the key is, frankly, to prevent you from harvesting 30 million books for all our members.

This does three things:

1. Prevents others from getting your data automatically unless you make your key public. Once you do, yes, it's public.
2. Prevents wholesale harvesting of LT data for our company's protection. You own your data; you do not own others' and can't move all of LT to another site the way that Russian site tried to do by screen-scraping.
3. Prevents Amazon from seeing it as a general purpose API to LibraryThing, which, we think, would bring them down on us, as it would be an API to their API--since the majority of our bibliographic data is from them.

I can't get a developer key even though I'm filling in the required form

>4 Sufurittu: This is a known problem that the developers are still repairing. See this thread:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/247608