I don't know if it sounds like homework either. This task was one of the first tasks given to me when I started at my current position. They found out I knew perl, handed me some legacy code that was really slow, and said - "Here, fix this, and make it faster."

I ended up re-writing an intranet application that retrieved stock information since many corporate employees weren't allowed internet access, but they still wanted to know certain, company related stock info (competitors, customers, etc...).

Companies like Reuters have subscription services, but they are really costly, especially if you aren't using the information for trading.

As far as content ripping goes, *shrug* I suppose if the anonymonk above was making the data available publically it couldbe a more severe issue, that's for his morals to decide.

C-.