Re: [syndication] Policies and so on

[Dror Matalon <dror@zapatec.com>]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 02:58:01PM -0000, Jerome Chevillat wrote:
> Hi there -
> 
> Talking about policies and NewsIsFree,...
> Please correct me if i am wrong, i noticed that NewsIsFree provides 
> rss files from content providers that DO NOT provide syndication 
> files. I assume they generate them from the html pages (which is 
> probably a pain, I am grateful and impressed)!

That's correct. The term used for this is scraping.

> And they would probably provide such files if they knew about RSS...

Possibly.

> 
> Here are my questions: I am wondering how much is that legal ? 
> NewsIsFree is kind of "making business" with someone else content... 

Legal where? Might be legal in some places but not in others. In
general, I doubt that that it's clear cut, but if I had to make the case
for it I would point to the following:

1. Scraping is very similar to search engine results. If it's legal for
google, yahoo, etc to display information from your site on their pages
it's probably ok display the headlines. Actually google caches your
pages which is much more questionable than just showing the headlines.

2. When you scrape you should pay attention to robots.txt. Assuming that
you do, you could point out that there's a well known, well understood
way to stop people from crawling/scraping your site. Kind of like
posting a "private property" sign. So the site has an easy way to stop
you from scraping.

So I would guess that NewsIsFree is probably ok. Of course if any site
asks them to stop scraping they should do so. If they want to be extra
careful they should read the terms of the sites that they're scraping :-).

> 
> I am sort of new to the list so the question might have been raised 
> before!
> And probably I should add that I am just raising the problem for a 
> friendly discussion and not for some "behind the bell" (only french 
> expression??) attack!
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Jerome
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Dror Matalon
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