A day or so ago a huge storm began brewing in the freelance community over an RSS feed that was mistakenly thought to be stolen material. The material in question was a very handy blog site that has job listings every day. The author of the site works very hard to gather the info and when she saw it all reposted on a Live Journal site she had a fit.
Turns out that the LJ user was using her Friends page as a feed aggregator so she could stay on top of the blog in a timely manner but the blog owner still feels it's stealing and people have gotten very upset.
In non techie language, it works like this:
I write a column here on Gather.
You want to read my column everyday but you don't want to come here and find it everyday so you "subscribe" to my feed through Live Journal
My column now appears in FULL with links, etc. inside YOUR Live Journal webpage everyday and everyone who visits YOUR page sees MY work.
Isn't that a good thing? Isn't that the point of writing and syndicating, so people find and read your work? And if my links go with it and someone clicks, I still get "credit" for that click be it an amazon link or some affiliate deal. Again, all good.
And yet, several in the writing community disagree (well, more than several). They say it's like cutting and pasting a column into your own blog. That you should ask permission, or better yet, don't take their feeds at all.
To which I say - then why have a feed if you don't want to share your information in that format.
Maybe I'm missing something but I seem to be alone in the thought that this is not only okay but actually HELPFUL to a writer. I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially in light of the many 'cut and paste" complaints I see here on Gather.
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Comments: 12
If the work is attributed, and the author accepts the Free Speech nature of the internet, then I guess there should be no problem. However if the work is NOT attributed, and/or the author has a more proprietary attitude towards their work - in which case the internet is probably not the medium they should be working in - then I can see there would be conflicts.
RSS is just a tool after all, and many sites use it successfully. But any tool can be abused and anyway, you can't please all of the people all of the time. Gather is a great example of that.
The bottom line is, if you don't want someont to do something with your content, put it in an explicit notice.
The main problem with people misusing RSS feeds is when they scrape a bunch and republish it solely to drive traffic to an ad-laden site. This is very different from an LJ feed.
You can get my main blog (kitchenMage) as kitchMage at LJ, something my daughter set up so she could read me in her friends list there. Now I have a handful of LJ readers, which I think is sort of amusing.
My viewpoint is if you don't want it spread, don't publish it.
Note: Using Sitemap protocol supplements the other methods that we use to discover URLs. Submitting a Sitemap helps Yahoo! crawlers do a better job of crawling your site. It does not guarantee that your web pages will be included in the Yahoo! Search index.
I am not an attorney and so the next statement is solely my opinion and belief based on my understanding of the copyright and intellectual property rights laws.
Unless any publisher who allows RSS access to his content specifically forbids the posting of that content elsewhere, then is in effect allowing use of his content in aggregation and other sites. Many would disagree with I am sure and I would love to have an attorney clarify the law in this matter for us all.