How to Republish an RSS Feed Without Stealing Content (Pt.2)
Yesterday I replied to the arguments made by people who want to reprint blog posts or RSS feeds in full, often without proper credit.
Let me be clear: I have no problem with others excerpting or discussing my posts – I wholeheartedly encourage that. That’s part of the natural beauty of the blogosphere. My problem is with people who reprint the entire post and pass it off as their content, without my permission and without proper attribution and links, or who use my content without my permission to improve their own standing with their readers or with the search engines.
So what’s the right way to republish an RSS feed or blog post? I suggest four guidelines:
1) If you want to reprint an entire post on your site with the purpose of populating your domain with good articles or sharing an interesting or useful article with your readers, simply ask permission first and always include a link back to the original post when permission is granted. If you need good content and don’t want to ask permission, go to a free articles directory; don’t poach articles from blogs.
2) If you want to discuss or respond to a post in an original post of your own, feel free to cut and paste snippets here and there, or to summarize the post in your own words, and always include a link back to the original post. This is extremely common and encouraged in the blogosphere. You can find examples of how others have used my posts in this way at Philanthropy Journal’s Give and Take, which I approve of 100%.
3) If you want to excerpt a post without any original writing of your own, feel free to use the first paragraph (or a small amount of teaser text — usually not more than 50-100 words) and then include a link back to the full, original post. Again, this is extremely common and generally encouraged.
4) If you want to use RSS to automatically add content to your site, like many news aggregator sites do, set up your pages to take only headlines or a limited number of characters or words from the top of the article. And yes, always include a link back to the original post! This is what Ogilvy PR does with my feed and the feeds of many others in our sector.
I’m not suggesting we stifle conversation. I am suggesting that if you want an online presence, you do the work of content creation yourself and not rip off your digital neighbors.
Do these guidelines make sense to you? Leave a comment and let me know.
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.
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.
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?
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.