RE: [syndication] Moreover Terms and Conditions for free use

[dave.cantrell@gunter.af.mil]

>Publishers are able to provide their own headline feeds under there own
>terms if they want to and I think they should be able to prevent headline
>aggregators from using their headlines if they wish to do so, much like a
>robots.txt can keep the search engines out.

Alis,

I agree with pretty much everything you said. However, while I agree with
your statement above, what about screen-scrapers? There was a list of feeds
that was sent out a few days back and it included MSNBC -- AFAIK MSNBC
doesn't publish RSS, though I may be wrong. What if they don't want their
content aggregated like that? I dunno why they would feel that way as it
drives traffic to their site, but it's possible -- I think the New York
Times asked Dave Winer to stop publishing their content on his site. He
wasn't screen scraping, just pulling a feed they had available but not made
public, but I think it shows that some are intent on keeping their content
to themselves or at least only providing it to those who pay.

I don't really see a way to prevent screen-scraping except to use a
Dilbert-esque random-garbage technique, where they have the actual image
name include random numbers along with the date so bots can't just pluck it
out without the user seeing the ads. Of course, with a little bit of extra
programming you can get around that too...

-dave