January 16, 2005
More on RSS and Copyright
Scoble’s got more links regarding the issues below. As expected, a lot of it is knee jerk “bloggers can’t do this!” mixed with ad hominem attacks. That’s too bad. Chris Baus and Russell Beattie raise the issue of what CC’s non-commercial/commercial distinction actually means. It’s not entirely clear to me that Russell’s examples would not be commercial or would somehow be considered fair use. Indeed, Martin argues the legal issue in his matter is fairly clear. Cases like Basic Books and MP3.com seem rather on point here. One of the key issues seems to be what having an RSS feed implies others should be able to do with one’s website. If Martin had no RSS feed and Bloglines was simply scraping the site, it seems people would feel very differently. But why must RSS make a difference in this case?
Filed by Derek Slater at 11:17 am under General news
2 Comments
Perhaps the difference is that Martin *chose* to publish a *stripped* version of his own site in a format that includes the word *syndication*?
There is a usual and customary definition of RSS. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous. If you don’t want your site syndicated, don’t publish in a syndication format.
I think blogoshere is way off on the wrong direction. RSS feeds are copyrighted matterial. It doesn’t matter what the “customary definition” of RSS is. Schwimmer might be a dofus, but from a legal perspective he probably has a point. I’m waiting for more IP lawyers to chime in here. Where is Lessig?