Can RSS Feeds be Considered Content Theft?
 

In addition to what I do in adult, I also keep some mainstream blogs and recently I was hit by this huge outcry from a blogger who objected to her RSS feeds being used on other public sites such as LiveJournal. She's calling the blog owner a plagiarist and jumping on her for "stealing" her content.

This is the rational (which frankly escapes me)

If I put your feed on my private reader, that's okay because only I'm reading it.
If I put your feed on my blog space, or friends page at LiveJournal where other people can see it, I'm stealing your work.

Isn't the whole point of RSS feeds to spread the work around? Certainly, in adult, we'd never think of saying RSS feeds are only for your personal use, don't put them on your blogs.

So is it different in the mainstream?

Well, RSS feeds were originally intended to be fed to RSS Readers, which are applications right on your computer. I don't think many people ever thought that people would read them into a website and reproduce them.... not at first anyway.

So many people, particularly mainstreamers, still think that RSS is only for RSS Readers.

In an ideal world, each company/person who creates an RSS feed would have a TOS along with it dictating how and when it can be used on another site.

good point

I wonder if the original blog that is putting out the rss feed can get penalized by google for duplicate content as well by having a feed out there?

Good observations.

But as the copyright holder of the original, she has the right to say not to use her content.

That's what happens when lots of amateurs start cranking out sites and don't know the ramifications of producing a feed.

I would have assumed like you, if they have a feed, they want people to use it.

Her big complaint is that if people read off site they don't visit her page for the hits but RSS feeds can be customized to only show the start of an article so people have to click through for the rest.

To me, that's the best of both worlds - you get the outreach but you force them to come to you for the goods. Of course, then it's all about writing compelling content so they do click through and that's up to the original writer.

A good parser will pull and include the author and a link to the originating site.. of the article which removes any plagiarism issues.. that is if the article/post has the info included..

If it's just a blog setup with journal type entries, then there should be a warning of sorts on the site; prohibiting use of the content...

It may not stop the miners, but they'll have it to fall back on should they find their stuff on someone else's blog..

As was said in another post... too many lazy ass wannabe's trying to set up an autopilot blog using mined content without checking anything...

Blogs aren't blogs anymore...