An ethical dilemma
I've written a little program that screen-scrapes a narrowly-targeted news site I visit regularly. I've scheduled the program so it runs automatically every hour. My program creates an RSS 0.92 file, which conveniently lands in a directory that Radio upstreams to my Radio site. I've subscribed to this RSS file, so I can look at new headlines in the Radio News Aggregator.
I've not named the site because, while I think I'm making fair use of the material on the site by reading it myself, I probably would be violating copyright if I made it available to others. On the other hand, the site does not seem to have a robots.txt file to restrict web spiders from indexing its content. It seems that, were I to make its headlines available to my weblog readers, I wouldn't be doing anything much different than what Google does--I would be indexing by publication date rather than by content. I'm not appropriating their stories, just their headlines. The headlines still link to stories on their site.
Is what I'm doing wrong? Is it illegal?
[Later: I posted this item on the Radio discussion group, and a small discussion is in progress.]
[Later, still: I think what I'll probably do is write to the webmaster at the site in question and encourage them to publish an RSS file, but also ask for permission to generate my own until they do. ]
11:37:57 AM 
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