Comments on: How to Republish an RSS Feed Without Stealing Content (Pt.2)

By: Kivi Leroux Miller

Kivi Leroux Miller — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:42:25 +0000

Hi Andrew — Thanks for your note. I understand the service you provide and see how what I’ve written here doesn’t quite work for you. I see the value in news aggregator sites when they are truly providing a service to a specific audience and are not just grabbing content to generate AdSense revenue or whatever. I hope if an author asks to be removed from your site for some reason that you would do so without quibbling about it and staking some claim to the content just because it’s available as a feed.

By: Nancy Schwartz

Nancy Schwartz — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:10:35 +0000

Kivi,

Thanks for defining these very useful guidelines. I’ve had the same experience (my content being swiped as an entire article, and promoted under the name and photo of a staffer at a nonprofit marketing agency in the DC area), and was shocked. Took me a phone call and some angry words to get the article removed.

Question is — how do we get these guidelines more broadly accepted as standards?

By: Andrew Hunt

Andrew Hunt — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 18:00:29 +0000

I manage the website for Common Ground Athens, and we have a feed aggregator ( http://planet.commongroundathens.org )that publishes feeds from community members–both their original blogs as well as shared items. Users of Google Reader who want to share stories can do so by adding a feed of their shared items, but it puts the whole content of the post through the feed.

Now, I’ve never had any misgivings about this: the site is explicitly a feed aggregator, and all posts have the title linked to the original and the author cited. However, since it includes the whole content and users don’t go around asking permission first, it seems to go against these principles you set.

What’s your thought on this sort of system? I wonder if some of it may be the difference between two conceptions of what RSS is:
1. as merely publishing in XML as opposed to HTML or print, and therefore subject to the same care about republishing; or
2. a form of broadcasting (as symbolized in the icon) in which it’s not just allowed, but expected, that one display it elsewhere (just as a TV or radio broadcast is presumed to be played out loud)

Neither conception of RSS would allow posts to be plagiarized, with someone claiming the writing to be one’s own. However, there’s a growing presumption (whether true or false) in the Web 2.0 age that what gets put on the web is free to move all around the web, with attribution and links.

By: Michele Martin

Michele Martin — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:33:55 +0000

Kivi, these guidelines make complete sense to me. The blogosphere is about sharing, not stealing or taking credit for someone else’s work. Clearly you’re up to something if you don’t want to link back to the original article.