February 11, 2004, 1:36 AM ET
Topix.net service policy: Hypocrisy in action

First, I was intrigued by Topix.net, an automated site whose robots screen-scrape thousands of American news sites and categorize the content for easy browsing by topic. It is innovative and useful, and the folks who put it together, alumni of the Open Directory Project, really know their stuff.

But I happened upon the site's Terms of Service and was appalled by its hypocrisy and cheekiness. It left such a bad taste in my mouth that I can't bring myself to say anything else nice about the service.

Let's take a look at the "Use of the Service" section of that page.



Topix.net Violates Right of Free Speech