Thanks Teli, a good post.
I should start by saying that I'm a huge fan of Really Simple Syndication. I think raising awareness of this aspect of the subject on here is a good move. I've recently been discussing RSS scraping on my blog and trying to give people an idea about acceptable and responsible practices.
Linda kindly lets me syndicate content from these forums and the 5Star blog and it seems pretty popular with my visitors even if there aren't exactly thousands of them
(Initially I was a bit embarrassed to have discovered I was unwittingly firing off trackbacks/refbacks/pingbacks to these forums but fortunately my apologies were taken in good faith and I fixed the problem from my end).
I will own up to having promoted "automated" blogging software in the past, but, like Teli, have also tried to emphasize "this is not a substitute for your own original content" and should be used as a time saving tool to enhance/compliment your own efforts. Misuse, as you say, will get you nowhere other than to be labelled a "splogger".
I know sites that scrape my feeds and I don't have a problem with it - it brings me links, visitors and subscribers. None of them have ever asked permission to do it but I've checked out the places where I see my feed being used and so far haven't seen it abused. Perhaps if I saw blatant plagiarism with no links back to me or my site I would take issue with the site owner.
To be honest I'm glad of the publicity
Both sites in question are young and struggling in a very overcrowded sector.
To anyone who is thinking of scraping, the rules are simple enough. If clear permission isn't given, ask first, even if permission is directly implied it's still good manners to talk to the owner of the feed. If the site has a clear copyright statement or forbids syndication, don't do it, end of story. Some organizations
will go after you for theft of intellectual property rights etc. and you don't want to find yourself in that kind of hot water.
If you steal and think you'll never get caught, think again. I know for a fact that a number of high profile bloggers for example, set traps for the unauthorized scraping brigade. You can be sure plenty of others have ways to detect and combat it too.
Mo