What are the legalities of repackaging other's RSS feeds into a new presentation? [closed]

Question

I know that services like my.yahoo.com allow you to add content from RSS feeds to your personal page, but in general they are links which draw the user to the site which provided the feed. What are the legalities and implications of using RSS feeds as a data source for a site which repackages the data so as to be unrecognizable that it came from said source.

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Does credit need to be given? It is a copyright violation? What is ethical?

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What if credit is stated? Does this change your opinion? Does permission need to be granted?

Answer 1

Of course it's ethical! What on earth is RSS for if not for syndication, into as many varied and wonderful forms as developers can think up?

Permission, of course, must be asked for - in the form of a "GET /feed/ HTTP 1.0". And it must be granted in the form of a "200 OK" - or denied in the form of a "403 Forbidden".

Screen scraping is at least morally ambiguous, since perhaps the author only wants humans, and not programs, to view the content (assuming you believe it's within the rights of the author to make that distinction). But RSS? Seriously? No one forces anyone to make a syndicated, easily-mungable format of their content. It's not just useful for new presentations, it's meant for it.

Answer 2

In my opinion it depends on the data source company as to whether they allow it in their terms and conditions. It probably also depends on where your servers are located (i.e. Which legal framework they fall under.)

Unless it is allowed explicitly or you have written consent I don't think it's ethical.

It also depends on how big your legal department is.