as to your second question, I’ve written something that I will be posting later about this issue.

As to the first question, one has to wonder about the wisdom of putting a product out on the World Wide Web for anyone to see (I was able to get screenshots on Thursday, and this whole controversy was brewing since at least Monday) when it’s in such an “alpha” phase.

And I should also note that the first version banner that I screencapped didn’t even HAVE the word “Beta” in the corner.

And, if you’d read my earlier post about this, I noted that this was most likely a “work in progress, but it was being rolled out.

As of this moment – 7 p.m. EDT, July 29, 2008 – the site is live and points to the Ohio State University’s Campus Daily Guide.

You’re right that there are betas and there are betas… and the word doesn’t mean what it used to. But in this case, it truly was a beta. I don’t think they expected all this to blow up because they were still building the site and hadn’t started talking to papers about it. It’s clear to me, from looking at the site for our campus, that it’s not yet fully baked. If this was the final product, I can pretty well guarantee it will crash and burn. But it’s pretty obvious that this is a work in progress, and to suggest otherwise just because the word “beta” is over- or mis-used seems ridiculous to me.

As for what you’re saying is a legal issue, what’s the basis for that? There’s no legal issue with linking to another site that I’m aware of. Does the Drudge Report license its content? Does Google? Of course not. I’m not aware of any legal issue when a web site contains links to content on other web sites. (There has been litigation over “deep links” that have not been resolved by the courts, but that’s not what’s at issue here.)

If you’ll look at your GMail account, it’s also a “Beta,” even though I’ve been using it for over four years. As is Google Docs and Google News. These days, “beta” is a semi-useless term.

I’m sure they could scrape RSS feeds from other papers, much as I do at right with those icons that pull up posts from other people’s weblogs. I could, however, see a campus newspaper arguing that the site is garnering readership from the newspaper’s content, and therefore should receive some compensation.

And lest we all think this is settled, it’s not, legally.

As for what sites they pull a news feed from, I’m sure they initially grabbed the stuff from their own CP system. But this whole system is built around technology that scrapes data from other sites — so I’m sure they could easily write the code to scrape a news feed from campus papers which aren’t on the College Publisher platform. Most probably even offer an RSS feed, so it will be easy to do. And that’s what I believe they will do by the time they go live.