The Copyright Debate and RSS
by Sharon Housley
Published on this site: August 20th, 2005 - See
more articles from this month
RSS is commonly defined as really simple syndication. So,
this means that any material contained in a feed is available
for syndication, right? Well no, not exactly. It means that
the content contained in an RSS feed is in a format that is
syndication friendly, if the copyright holder allows for syndication.
Offering a feed for syndication does not in fact grant any
legal rights to anyone to reuse the feeds content beyond what
the Copyright laws grant as Fair Use.
In practice, while your feed might legally be protected,
you could literally spend weeks attempting to protect the
contents of your feed. Legal gray areas are introduced with
Search Engines indexing feeds and RSS Feed Directories including
copywritten feeds, in their categorized directories. How do
you distinguish between a legitimate search engine, RSS directory
and someone simply reproducing the contents of a feed for
personal gain? Legally how can you defend against one and
not the other?
One can ask whether it is legally is it wrong to reproduce
content in a feed. Morally is it wrong? Does the site have
a purpose or value outside of the syndicated content? Is the
aggregation of topic specific feeds in itself a value?
If you use the feeds for content and label the site a directory
does that make it any more legal? What about personal web
aggregators? If it is for personal use,is it OK?
Take a look at the following topic specific feed directories:
Financial Investing - http://www.finance-investing.com
or
Security Protection - http://www.security-protection.net
One could argue that the above sites do in fact provide value,
aggregating and categorizing related topic specific feeds
in a single location. In fact those in the security sector
of the finance arena might find the above sites of significant
value but what of the content creators?
Laws and Technology Collide
Most people publishing content via RSS support republication
of feeds. Because the technology is fairly new, the laws and
legalities are still murky. It is assumed that content in
RSS is protected by copyright laws but let us not forget the
Internet is global and their is not a centralized body governing
what is right or what is wrong. Not only does law and technology
collide the laws of different countries, those creating the
feed and those displaying the contents of the feed may contradict
each other. It is for this reason, I would advise that publishers
using RSS to assume that the contents of their RSS feeds will
be syndicated and replicated.
Tips and Tricks to Protect Your Feed
That is not to say there are not things that can be done to
protect feeds. At the end of the day being proactive is the
best way to protect intellectual property.
Part of feed protection is ensuring that appropriate credit
is given, this can be arranged by including a copyright assignment
in the final line of the Item Description field.
Additionally you can include links back to your website in
the Item description field.
Use teaser copy in the RSS feed's Item description field,
linking back to your website which contains the full contents
of the post.
At the end of the day, protecting the contents of a feed
can be daunting and limiting. Controlling your contents to
ensure appropriate credit and links are included is critical.
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com
software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts.
In addition Sharon manages marketing for NotePage http://www.notepage.net
a wireless text messaging software company
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