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

[Jim Winstead <jimw-yahoo@trainedmonkey.com>]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 01:48:02PM -0500, dave.cantrell@gunter.af.mil wrote:
> 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?

because it's me providing a screen-scraped msnbc feed (along with
others at http://trainedmonkey.com/news/feeds.php), i would hasten to
point out that i'm not charging anyone (msnbc or people pulling down
the msnbc feed) any money.

if they don't want me to publish their headlines, they are free to
contact me (and i've added more text to the feeds page to explain what
is going on and how to contact me, for those providers that happen to
notice the 24 hits they get referred from that page). originally, i
tried contacting a few of the sites i scrape from to see if they
provided any feeds, but never got anywhere, so i gave up. i'm just one
guy who wants to read news that is interesting to me, and the
republished feeds are just a side-effect to my efforts to make it
easier for me to do so. if content providers don't want me to share,
that is entirely their choice. (and as the saying goes, sometimes it
is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. :)

for what it's worth, that sharing of the msnbc feed was to one person
yesterday. for inside.com, my most popular republished feed, it's more
like ninety people. most likely, there are really fewer people than
that, because for a few weeks i had tried to kill the inside.com feed
by constantly spitting out unique 'this feed is dead' news items, and
the traffic for that feed barely dropped.

jim