I agree with you Tommy that pulling the RSS feed and putting it on the Iliad is a perfectly legitimate use of the feed. I wrote something similar to your perl script in python. The "stealing" part involves fetching the whole story, stripping off the window dressing that it had on its web site, and putting that on the Iliad. The provider of the feed expects you to click a link in your RSS reader and to go to their web site, which will display a bunch of annoying ads and on the off chance you click on one will pay them a bit of coin. So if you suck the story off the site and strip out their ads and such and put it on the Iliad they think of that as 'stealing' their content, just like they complain when people put their web page in a frame with someone else's advertising outside the frame.
I make no claim as to the rightness or wrongness of this, but for better or worse it is the current business model people like Reuters, AP, Etc use to "monetize" their work (that is code for get paid for having people do this all day long). I managed to get AP to tell me what it would cost to push the whole story to an Illiad and they said between $400 - $600 per story depending on how many people it was being sent to (I know that probably doesn't make sense but they see it as a way of collecting a fraction of the money you will be making off the story as sized by your readership, they are stuck in the magazine/newspaper model where number of subscribers determines what you can charge for ads, so if you have a lot of subscribers you can charge a lot for ads and make more per page, etc etc.)
Personally I'd like to cut AP out of the loop, basically create an automated system whereby people could submit a story for publication, pay them a fixed price for it, and then put together a newspaper from the best stories. But some people can't write, and other people are carrying some sekrit agenda (like they work for Microsoft in their day job) and so out of the chute I don't want to just pay people $500 a story but rather $1 a story and then publish it and figure out some way of measuring their credibility, as their credibility index goes up would be happy to pay them more. Sort of like reading Slashdot at a high moderation level. I figure an honest, hard working, journalist who reports a balanced account of the story is worth 500x more than one who is being compensated to be the mouthpiece of some special interest. Unfortunately there isn't a "Special Interest Lapdog" registry
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So the value-add of an Associated Press is that they have, in theory, screened their journalists and pay them an appropriate amount to keep them honest. If someone wrote two decent articles a week and got paid $500 each for them that would be a pretty decent wage in many parts of the USA.
Anyway, to hammer the point home. Ask any "famous" blogger for permission to pull their blog entries and publish them in your e-paper magazine. I expect most of them would ask you to pay them for that right, and if you said "But I don't pay anything to read you blog on Blogger" they will say but they get advertising revenue from visits to their blog page that they wouldn't get from you. So if you re-published them without their permission they might call it 'stealing' from them.
--Chuck