RSS is, in my opinion, only useful to a certain extent.
It allows syndication of multiple feeds in one centralized place (a news aggregator), it allows your content to be syndicated and displayed in trusted sites (as headlines) and, sadly, it's used to feed your original content to sploggers.
I've always found summarized content feeds to work the best. People who aggregate your feed will click through if they see something they like, trusted networks can still use your headlines and splogs will stay away from you because they want to avoid chopped off content.
As for the copyright issue, I agree with Splum.
