It is just like everything else. What is dubious and should be illegal is receiving monetary compensation or consideration of any value from the fruits of some one else's labor or established intellectual property.

HTML is the original "Free and Open Source" code and should remain so. Many have "scraped" or linked directly to other peoples content in order to by-pass un-needed information or to format the information for a different platform.
I do it all the time and store my efforts locally on my tablet and/or N900.


Now if I charged money for these pages or apps which use this content or included the code in a page on my website that I receive revenue from different ads and such, I should pay the producer for his efforts or expect to be held liable.

(This of course is a bit simplified for the sake of this discussion. Other liabilities exist such as altering trademarks and what not.)

If someone was using my data there are ways to obscure it, but others will always find a way to use it. It is easy however to track this use, and lawyers who are willing to serve, are piled up like cord wood outside the doors.

This system has worked since the Romans ruled the world and as far as I'm concerned it is not broken. HTML should always remain open.

One of my peeves when the iPhone first came out was in it's intent to upset this order by requiring content to be specifically formatted for its platform. This model of theirs has changed since its introduction because users demanded more... and that's a good thing.

On the plus side though, Apples model has kept legal fracases over content behind the doors of their app store where makers of the many different iFart apps can argue over who was first, or who's fart is the nastiest.

Meh...
I don't care, and have been happily pulling and using content from sites like Paul's Weather Page since I first cobbled together a windows socket back in the day .

Edited Update:
When I lived in the Bay Area I first started to go to Paul's page in order to quickly find needed information like "Will my campsite be flooded this week-end." or just knowing what clothes to pack for a short trip. Viewing the source code from his page back then and using it to experiment with variations on my own pages is what taught me how to use HTML in the first place.

For those who can remember back in the day, most information was only available via FTP so pulling and posting via HTML was a service for those who didn't have, or were not inclined to access it via Archie, Gopher, Veronica and Jughead . Also, there were only about 3,500 pages available then to use as a reference. Some of us even met up on the weekend in places like the parking lot of Fry's in Fremont, or the Point in Saucalito to swap code saved to floppies or written down on pieces of paper. It was truly a small world then.

This thread prompted some reminiscing (thank you). As a result I was just cruisin' his site where I came up with the following posting when I clicked on one of his links.

Unfortunately that^ was posted almost 3 years ago and sadly it is often the outcome when people become overly protective of even publicly sponsored data.
A good idea and useful service becomes stifled and the common man ends up with a soggy sleeping bag wearing the wrong dang shoes.