In short, they’ve held that an RSS feed is just another Web page, one meant to be viewed in a different browser. Considering that so many RSS feeds are published without the owner’s knowledge, it would be hard to hold that every person who publishes one intends to give the world the carte blanche to redistribute it. An implied license, by law, can only go as far as people would have likely negotiated a formal contract themselves and most would not have opened up their content for all to use and abuse.

There are plenty of reasons one would want to publish a full RSS feed without allowing resyndication. The big reason being not wishing to inconvenience the majority of site users based upon the actions of a very small minority of visitors.

After all, even a site with a tremendous RSS scraping problem will find that less than 5% of all visitors actually do anything fishy with the feed. The vast majority are always legit.

Just because one has the technology to do something with a piece of copyrighted material does not make it legal or ethical. “Taking advantage of… carelessness” does not make one’s actions rights. If I leave my car unlocked at night, that’s careless, but it doesn’t make it acceptable to steal.

As far as wasting time goes, I’m sure the huntress knows how easy it is to get such sites shut down and to protect one’s works. I never spend more than ten minutes on a case of plagiarism anymore. She probably spent a great deal more time writing this post than she did handling the matter.

On that note though, thank you for the heads up. I greatly appreciate the information.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Customizing_Feeds

http://www.feedburner.com

Syndicate what you don’t mind people republishing, don’t syndicate what you don’t want them to republish. Embed a link to your site in every feed post if you want. Embed your whole damn copyright if you want. Syndicate only the first 5 words if that’s all you can part with.

The power’s in your hands, huntress. Your time might be better spent learning how to control the situation instead of conspiring to bring down those who take advantage of your carelessness. They are merely syndicating your syndication feed, after all.

Normally Spamhuntress’ posts have a very obvious copyright notice on each post, her plugin must not be working after the server move recently. But even without a copyright notice in the feed that doesn’t give others permission to steal it.

I read you blog on 43people and/or on google.com/ig. I’m not quite sure why you publish an RSS feed if you don’t want other sites to agregate it. Some subscription feeds require a unique key in order to access them.

For web agregators, in which you can add any RSS feed, it would seem to be impossible for the site owners to read the copyrights the feeds they receive. In the case of your feed, there is not copyright in it. Google and every other search engine will index your site, and sell ads on their website, unless your robots.txt file forbids them from doing this.

FWIW, 43people doesn’t have ads on your syndicated page, and there is no reference to a copyright inside your RSS feed. People who want to read and/or leave comments are going to come to your site anyway.

If you simply don’t include the rss link in your site, most people are not going to know it exists.

Evidently, one can now download “reblogging” software to make this all very convenient. See http://www.reblog.org/ .

I have to admit, I was a bit perplexed when the person running the reblog posted this:
http://www.reknit.com/2006/08/a_plea_for_mercy_from_your_edi.htm

(A complaint that the people writing the original blogs are making her job difficult by, well, including stuff she’d prefer didn’t in her reblog!)