Screen Scraping

I’ve had a lot of requests for NewsGator to be able to scrape non-RSS-enabled sites, and create a “virtual feed” from them. Syndirella supports this capability on the client side; MyRSS can also create a feed from any web site, according to their documentation.

Here’s the question I have. Do you think scraping content from a site is legal or ethical? I don’t think so. For starters, I would think there are copyright issues. You’re taking content, which belongs to someone else, and reproducing it in another form for your own use. Maybe this is allowable use, I don’t know…I’m certainly not a lawyer.

What about sites that make their living based on advertising impressions? Tools that scrape these sites are literally stealing money from them.

Any comments? Am I off base here?