“Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on your point of view.” (I think Kenobi says that in Star Wars.)
I read an interesting article not long ago about the difference between using RSS feeds as spam and about using RSS feeds to improve user experience. Some of the stuff about mashups and newsmaster sites is fascinating indeed.
There’s a big difference between a site with a news feed and links to news articles from sources and a site that rips content with no attribution and no backlink. There’s also a big difference between a site that excerpts a sentence from a news article and a link along with some biting, edgy commentary.
Some people might lump all of those in with “scraper” sites. Some won’t.
At the end of the day, what’s best for the user and what’s going to enable you to look in the mirror and feel like you’ve done something useful today?