RSS = Real Simple Stealing?? When is and isn't legal?

50 bloggers...

RSS rocks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_syndication

I know its wikipedia, but if anything is correct on wikipedia its stuff that has to do with web 2.0.

Says the inventors of RSS.

And what makes this a law? Well, look at Trademark laws for example. An owner of a trademark has to protect it, or he can lose it.

Until this kind of stuff goes to a court it will be hard to judge if its legal or not, but I am sure Trademark laws will serve as an example. You have given up the information in a RSS feed, where RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication.

Syndication means, providing content you create to other parties for their own use. You provide the RSS for free, its directly accessible on your site, without anything in it that says what to allow and what not to allow.

If now of course you add something like a CreativeCommons entry in the RSS Feed, that actually states its not for reuse, you might have a care, but as long as nowhere in the feed it is expressly stated that it can not be used for SYNDICATION, I think you will have problems infront of a judge.

Its actually the other way around. You don't have permission to take
someones work unless you have his consent.
And just because someone invented a thing called RSS won't change this.

From a legal standpoint, Zango as well claims to be ok
that still doesn't makes it right.

Thats what courts are here to deceide. Its not that easy. RSS is BASICALLY like taking an article, and bringing copies of it to 10 news papers. There is no major difference here, its not that easy.

As I said, it has to be deceided by a court until we really know what a judge might take of it, but RSS is simply what it says, SYNDICATION, which means, give content to others to reproduce and use on their own.

It is BY DEFINITION.

Right,
I somehow doubt the court will give two cents about a definition.
Take the following scenario, someone publishes a copyrighted article.
If you copy that stolen content to republish it I doubt
anyone will care if you tell them it was RSS so you've got the right to use it.

Actually, I highly doubt it. Newspapers do not release all their articles as RSS for a reason.

Do not get me wrong, I hate the fact that so many spam blogs are out there, its useless crap. But what I can absolutely not accept is people complaining about others using their full articles from RSS feeds since there is such an EASY and LOGICAL way to solve it. Stop syndicating ALL of the article! Syndicate only a part of it. It helps everyone! The spam blogs do not lose any traffic, they nolonger do something you hate, but _YOU_ actually GAIN traffic by people wanting to read the full article!

If you do not want people syndicating your content then do not friggin offer it for syndication!

Thats like saying if you don't want your sites to be ripped don't put them on the internet.

I'm curious what makes you think that if something is put on the web,
one way or another, you're fully entitled to get a profit from my work.

rss good, stealing bad

if you really dont want your stuff to be replublished by rss
just get rid of it...fairly easy for those who dont want to have thier content "stolen"