Re: Is framing theft?

[Hope Cascio <hope -dot- d -dot- cascio -at- US -dot- ARTHURANDERSEN -dot- COM>]

As I see it, there are a couple of scenarios involved here.  One is the
"framing" scenario.  It's cheesy and nasty as spam, but you can avoid being
the victim of framing by forcing your page into a new browser window when
someone calls your page's URL.  Sella Rush reminded us of the HTML tag that
you can use.

The second one is the "XML" scenario that Charles Heinemann talks about in
the Site Builder article Mark Baker pointed out for us.  I'd welcome
discussion on the ethics of this.  Taking stock quotes that someone else
provides, not crediting them for providing the hard data, but radically
manipulating it for your own devices, could be compared to buying paint,
not crediting the art supply retailer, and painting a portrait.  After all,
the data is freely provided to anyone on the Web.  But you are then also
stealing customers from their site, "hits" the site needs to justify
selling advertising on their site, or robbing the sponsoring company's
efforts at goodwill/positive public image.

Somehow, I feel certain, there will be a workaround for this, either
company's will enable people like "Jenny" to do this, provided they give
the company credit (for instance, letting Jenny use a company-hosted applet
that is an all-in-one deal, providing both content and company logo) or
rewrite the code for the website so that it would be impossible to "rob"
data from the site and funnel it into another one.  Sorta like how my ISP's
freely provided hit counter only works on their own domain.

.02,
Hope Cascio