Hi, I wondering if grabbing content headlines from other sites is legal.

Content like :

- latest news
- latest discussions from forums
- latest jobs

I've noticed that many people do this, but is it legal if the site owner hasn't given permission or is this one of those 'grey areas' ?

http://www.webdesignforums.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4351 is something I made. I gave credit to BBC in the PNG template as well as the post, but it's still a gray area.

A decent number of sites publish rdf or other files to facilitate this. Slashdot has the following info on getting their headlines:

http://slashdot.org/code.shtml

Personally I wouldn't do it unless the site you are pulling from approves, even if you are just using a perl script to rip their headlines from their web page and put them into yours.

it's a grey area isn't it ?

I reckon it's fine if you state the source

I sometimes use things that have come straight from another site and I use a headline that's linked directly to that site
and on a couple of occasions I've taken a story and paraphrased it and had the link on the page 'full story here to go directly to the original site

and I tell the site owner/manager/whatever that I'm about to do that

no one's complained to me yet, so I guess I'm saying it's better to state the source than to just take it from elsewhere

it's also good manners and there's such a lack of good manners in this game we should at least try to have some sort of moral standard

Thank you for your comments!

best of luck to you, let us know when you have the feeds set

and I, for one,
and I'm sure that there are heaps more here willl visit and wish you well

You can use a service like Moreover (www.moreover.com), it costs a lot for companies but it's free for you (at least it used to be). A lot of sites also have RSS feeds which you could grab.

Of course its legel :)

Just make sure to give the writer all the credit :)