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This is the personal site/blog/experiment of Chris Harrison, a web designer living, working and playing in Augusta, GA.

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04.11.2007

RSS Fair Use?

If you pub­lish an RSS feed, does it give oth­ers the right to repur­pose your con­tent as they see fit?

I have been notic­ing fre­quent track­backs from a cou­ple of sites when I’ve tagged arti­cles with a key­word of “adsense”. On the sur­face, this isn’t a big deal. When I checked the sites out, how­ever, I real­ized they were noth­ing more than Con­tent Scrap­ing Spam Blogs. I sent a note ask­ing for one par­tic­u­lar site to stop scrap­ing my con­tent and the guy had the audac­ity to send this to me:

“Dude, I am not scrap­ing your con­tent, I’m link­ing to your site with a small quote. Most peo­ple are happy to have free links to their site. If you don’t want any­one else to link to your site then why are you syn­di­cat­ing it with a feed?  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_syndication

Take down your feed or at least put a notice that no one else can use it.”

What are your thoughts on this? If I have a pub­licly avail­able feed, does it give oth­ers the right to re-syndicate that con­tent with­out the author’s permission?

This item was posted by Chris Harrison.

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4 comments on “RSS Fair Use?”

  1. Posted by Ben G. on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007.

    I’m fairly cer­tain that it all depends on how you’ve licensed your con­tent. Since you’ve clearly marked your con­tent under an All Rights Reserved license no one can repro­duce it any­where (except for fair-use) with­out your per­mis­sion. If a site is scrap­ing your RSS feed and pub­lish­ing your work ille­gally you should issue them a cease and decist order. I’ve got a stock one if you want to use it.

  2. Posted by Chris Harrison on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007.

    That’d be awe­some. If you could send it via gTalk or email, that’d rock. Thanks Ben.

  3. Posted by Ben G. on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007.

    I’m fairly cer­tain that it all depends on how you’ve licensed your con­tent. Since you’ve clearly marked your con­tent under an All Rights Reserved license no one can repro­duce it any­where (except for fair-use) with­out your per­mis­sion. If a site is scrap­ing your RSS feed and pub­lish­ing your work ille­gally you should issue them a cease and decist order. I’ve got a stock one if you want to use it.

  4. Posted by Chris Harrison on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007.

    That’d be awe­some. If you could send it via gTalk or email, that’d rock. Thanks Ben.