The Coming RSS Feed Licensing Mess
from the what-can-you-do? dept
With all the talk lately about what people can or can't do with other sites' content, it's only going to get more confusing. Steve Yelvington perfectly lays out the problem that a number of people have been coming to terms with. Once a site offers up an RSS feed, does that mean anyone can do anything with it? If not, how should they limit it? Some sites claim that feeds are only for "non-commercial" use, however that generally seems to assume that the feeds are there for people to put on their website for public display, rather than to use in an aggregator. Yelvington points out some different "licensing" policies that different RSS providers use, showing how confusing it can get. However, I think the problem may be even worse. Concerning the issue I laid out above... if a professional investor reads an RSS feed and makes a buy or sell decision based on that information, hasn't he used the RSS feed for commercial purposes? If a blogger who runs ads on his or her site, uses an RSS feed to find something useful to post to the blog, has he or she violated the non-commercial claim? Once again, the issue comes back to "control." Content providers need to learn to let go. Content users want to be free to do what they want with the content that's out there. That's what's so nice about RSS. Slapping silly, unenforceable regulations on it doesn't help your users, it just confuses them and makes them look elsewhere for content without restrictions.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Same thing with ads
Our members aggregate all of their feeds into one place in Capango and can do things like group them together by topic and theme, with one "message" that contains multiple items. So we know what happens when some of the content providers start putting ads in their feeds - our members drop them like hot potatos and pick up other feeds. Those silly ad-hungry providers just can't figure out that they will lose in the end.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Same thing with ads
Fair's fair.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
fair use
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
license number
[ link to this | view in chronology ]