I'm asking more than answering this question.

Another thread sparked a conversation about the legality of others republishing your feed and Adam suggested dedicating a thread to the question.

I agreed and this thread is born.

My thought is that when you syndicate content you are in essence allowing others to republish that content. I do think you might be able to hold onto some of the rights to the content, but you might have to explicitly mention it.

I'm no legal expert so please understand the above is just opinion and my general sense.

My impression, though is when you publish a feed you are implicitly granting permission to others to grab your feed and republish it. I think it's one of the reasons why many splogs are publishing blog content instead of non-blog content. The ease is another reason.

I've had my own dealings with hosting companies who told me that a site that was using my content was not in violation of any laws by republishing my content. That's what led me to the opinions above.

If anyone does know the laws please share and point to some links with the info. And if you don't know, but have an opinion jump on in and share that too.

Either we'll find the relevant laws or we'll have some fun debating them.

Well, I'm no attorney either and I'd bet that the laws vary significantly from country to country, but I'll add my 2 cents anyway:

There are 3 reasons that people publish feeds (afaik):

1) To allow others to republish very easily;
2) To help search engines properly index a page (not sure of just how effective this is); and
3) To allow others to be informed of site updates virtually immediately.

It is this last that brings up the legality issue. Sometimes you just want your customers to be able to be informed of updates to your site through their feed reader without having to visit your site everyday in an effort to encourage people to come back as things are updated. If this is the intention and the feed is done as intended -- i.e. just a summary of what's been posted -- then copying the feed would be a violation of a few copyright laws, again afaik. There's a fair usage clause that will thwart many people's lawsuits and the fact that to have any good legal standing in the US you actually have to file for a copyright (the govt should get it's fair share, right!)

Here's the principles I work off of:

• If I don't want people stealing it then I don't share it.
• If I want it to be hard for people to steal via automated progs and don't care about indexing, then I use javascript or ajax to render the page.
• If I want some indexing, I add the feed and use ajax/javascript for the page itself.
• If I want to help ensure that my content is unique and not stolen, then I get it indexed fast and update semi-regularly so that it doesn't look like all of the stolen copies.
• If I don't care, I offer both.

Remember this: laws are only as good as those who enforce them. In many areas you can't get the local law enforcement to do a **** thing and even in those areas where you can get them out to do their jobs, you have to be willing to put up a big fight: hunt people down, issue subpoenas, go to court ... and when that's all done you'll find the content hosted in a foreign country and your judgment unenforceable without some kind of treaty making it a lot of wasted effort, time, and money. Enforcement is the key here and there is no standardized way of enforcing content laws -- hell even in the legal arena it's a mess as the copyright/trademark agencies don't know squat about anything and just issue the "right" to the first filer despite legality and expect you to fight it out in court instead of doing their jobs well -- the consequence of letting govt morons have authority.

Again, just my 2 cents but I think you'll find that a lot of how things work out there really do go along these guidelines. I once had someone hack my software program and sell it from a US military base! Now, how do you think I could go after them without The 43rd declaring me an enemy combatant!

I think Jeremy's got it right on a number of points. Especially about enforcement.

Publishing an RSS feed almost certainly doesn't waive a person's rights to ownership of their work. It's true blog content seems to be scraped almost exclusively ... probably a lot of that is the ease of feeds. And the community nature and part that says a link in exchange for anything is a good deal. I notice a lot of blogs have a © in the footer, and a lot use Copyscape.

Good point about the different countries and who's laws take precedence. I agree too about the enforcement.

One thing I learned not too long ago was that while anything you publish carries a copyright the moment it hits the web you're only allowed to recover legal fees in a court case if you've paid to register the copyright. This refers to U.S. laws.

So if you go to court to sue someone for taking your content and win the case you still incur the legal fees. That makes it too expensive for most to bring the case to court in the first place. From what I gathered from the article there are many who'll take your content as long as they notice you didn't register the copyright. If they didn't they know it will be too costly for you to fight.

Registering with the library of congress can remove some limitations on what you can win, all around. A full suit might include legal fees, actual and punitive damages. I don't remember the numbers off hand, but the courts are more likely to go for a deterrent effect if the content creator hasn't paid up. Instead of something a lot like a standard deduction, you wind up actually having to show what [market] control over your content is worth to your business.

Stepping out on a limb, I would guess if a person marks their stuff as being copyrighted, or uses similar language to tell people not to copy it, that's the line in the sand. A person can choose to waive or retain their copyright in the offline world...

For those of us in the US, this will help: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#cr

Fees are here: http://www.copyright.gov/docs/fees.html

Remember though that govt informational websites are not law. The law, in fact, is not law. Case law matters more than the actual law (just read the babble from the US Supreme Court!) An attorney, in my personal, non-legal opinion, is absolutely necessary.

Just an FYI: although I was the one who suggested the spinoff thread, I'm not going to comment initially (other than this, obviously), just because I want to see what others think without my influence.

I pretty much made my opinion (non legal) made in the other thread. But I would like to provide a couple of links on the subject.

The Copyright Debate & RSS
RSS is commonly defined as really simple syndication. So, this means that any material contained in a feed is available for syndication, right? Well no, not exactly. It means that the content contained in an RSS feed is in a format that is syndication friendly, if the copyright holder allows for syndication. Offering a feed for syndication does not in fact grant any legal rights to anyone to reuse the feeds content beyond what the Copyright laws grant as Fair Use...

The copyright debate and fair use.

Can Feedburner prevent someone from using my content?

Unfortunately, we cannot remove your feed from sites which have resyndicated or redisplayed your content without your permission. The course of action available to you is to contact the site owners yourself and demand they remove your links or content wholesale. To look up the site's Internet Service Provider (ISP) information, you can visit http://www.dnsstuff.com/ and enter the domain in the DNS Lookup box on the upper right.

FeedBurner help page.

Given what I posted in the other thread (and here) it is pretty clear that I think that feeds don't grant permission to be used by anyone to do what they want. But I do believe in fair use and I don't think that websites and scrapers that publish a portion of your feed are in violation of copyright. The keyword here being "portion" a full feed repost to me is a pretty clear violation of a copyright.

I think the main thing here is that the law has yet to catch up to the technology and I'm sure there are lawyers who could make really good cases on either side.

And of course who's laws would govern any case.

I completely agree with you about republishing a partial feed, but legally I'm not sure how different that is from republishing the full feed. In either case you'd be republishing the content that an author has made available through a feed.

Given the murky laws the best advice is probably to spell out the rights you are and aren't granting. It probably won't stop everyone from grabbing your content, but it would stop some, and it would be there should the matter go to trial.

I'd also register your copyright, because the registration does seem to grant more rights to you than not registering.

Another obvious thing is to not publish a feed in the first place. There's no reason why your blog needs use rss. You can still post without it.

I've had and continue to have others republish my content. Usually within about 5 minutes of publishing a blog post the content is on a half dozen sites beyond mine. It's not fun, but realistically trying to prevent it will probably take more time and money than it's worth.

What I do is make sure to add a couple of links into each post to other posts on my site using absolute URLs (the full http://). That seems to help search engines identify which site has the original content and it generates a handful of mostly low quality links into my site.

Originally Posted by vangogh

What I do is make sure to add a couple of links into each post to other posts on my site using absolute URLs (the full http://). That seems to help search engines identify which site has the original content and it generates a handful of mostly low quality links into my site.

SUPERB suggestion!

Happy to help. It does seem to help search engines identify the original. And why not get a link back.

Make sure they're absolute links otherwise it could just end up pointing to another post of yours that the other site lifted.

The hardest part I see in all the copyright online is that while I believe in copyright protection enforcing it online is going to be impractical. That's especially true when you consider the temporary nature of some of the sites grabbing your content.

It's also true in light of the many businesses that we all want to keep that do little more than scrape our content. Think search engines. Their entire database is filled with content they took without asking permission.

We like when search engines have it because search engines can direct traffic to us, but it helps to further complicate the legality of things.

Originally Posted by vangogh

I think the main thing here is that the law has yet to catch up to the technology [...] I completely agree with you about republishing a partial feed, but legally I'm not sure how different that is from republishing the full feed. In either case you'd be republishing the content that an author has made available through a feed.

I'm not sure that's what's really going on here? There are some clear analogies in conventional law.

Publishing a television feed doesn't give anyone who can receive the data rights to do anything they'd like with it ... especially when a profit is involved. There are all kinds of bizarre regulations about how large a TV you can have in a restaurant or bar, to prevent them from becoming live movie theaters.

Putting a movie on DVD and renting it out at Blockbuster doesn't let me even make a personal copy of something I rent, let alone make them for friends. Imagine renting a DVD, cracking it, and giving away free copies after inserting an ad for your web site...! Even if you only showed the first half hour - and I'm not sure that's a great analogy, because my experience has always been with scrapers who grab as much as goes into an RSS feed - imagine the wrath of the movie studios. Look at the RIAA, where there isn't a profit motive for the copying.

President Ford pardoned Nixon. He wrote about why in his autobiography; a newspaper ( sorry, I forget which one ) published the paragraph explaining why in a book review, and lost a suit with a fair use defense. The court decided the one particular small piece they excerpted is the entire reason most people would buy the book. The reason I bring this up is that excerpts aren't automatically fair game.

I'm a believer in fair use myself. And for things to eventually fall into the public domain. But I also believe artists should be able to maintain some amount of say over their creations. Unfortunately that isn't always what copyright law does - the RIAA produces no art - but I don't think the ease of infringing on someone else's IP rights means everybody should accept the situation as carved in stone.

To add to the analogies that Forrest mentions, I also see it like getting home delivery of a newspaper. Just because I sign up to have the paper delivered to me at my doorstep instead of going to the news stand doesn't mean I can take the newspaper and make copies myself to sell or copy those into my own little cottage industry newspaper.

Interesting analogies and I'm not disagreeing with you about the morality. I know the law can get very specific at times in the U.S. and they may see your examples differently than the republishing a feed. I can't say that with certainty. Everything I'm offering here is opinion and speculation since I don't know the laws.

As fas as I know there haven't been many cases testing any of this. I think Google has been sued a time or two for republishing the content of others and I think they usually win here in the states.

Regardless of the laws I think the more difficult part is enforcing the laws. It seems impractical to fight every time someone grabs your content. I'm not saying that's right, but if you can't realistically prevent someone from republishing your content what good is the law.

Take your example of copying a DVD or CD. Outside of DRM how can companies prevent you from making a copy of something. Even with DRM they aren't doing so well.

How about the idea of purchasing a book and then lending it to all your friends? Is that fair to the author and publisher or the book? Is there any way to prevent it?

Hello -

Great thread and discussion. I believe that in the US, the law would hold that all rights go to the creator of the works... but the key legal question would be what rights are granted, and still held when a person/company publishes an RSS feed?

Most publishers intend that their RSS feeds may be read in private as intended, but that republishing for commercial purposes would be unlawful without permission because of the rights granted and maintained by the original author(s).

Some things you can do:

• Put a statement like this in your footer throughout your site: "RSS feeds are published for private reading purposes only -- not for commercial republication".
• Place a similar statement at bottom of all articles/posts, and include the name/URL of the only authorized website/publisher.

OPPORTUNITY: I think there is an opportunity to sell your feed to publishers (just like old media "syndication" deals) or perhaps swap with a publisher of complimentary content. To protect these trade rights, is yet another reason for copyright protection of your published RSS feeds.

Yours -
Scott

Originally Posted by vangogh

How about the idea of purchasing a book and then lending it to all your friends? Is that fair to the author and publisher or the book? Is there any way to prevent it?

Now this is a great question ... especially coming after the DRM one about the recording and motion picture associations of America. I don't think you meant the question rhetorically?

1. I lend and borrow books all the time. But I get or give them back - only one person can read at a time. ( On that note, authors love libraries, because they're large, institutional paying customers. )
2. I want to keep a copy of a book for my own reference, to reread or even lend it when the occasion strikes.
3. A friend of mine bought five copies of The Tipping Point, gave me one, and handed four more out to other friends. It's such a compellingly good book, and one that wants to be read slowly enough to absorb everything, that it made sense.

Part of that is because unlike Metallica, or Missy Elliot, Malcolmn Gladwell never sued any of his fans. Part of the reason DRM is working so poorly is because most people don't have a great deal of respect for the RIAA or MPAA. For good reason.

But most site owners and bloggers aren't multi-national corporations that sue eight year olds.

Originally Posted by vangogh

It seems impractical to fight every time someone grabs your content. I'm not saying that's right, but if you can't realistically prevent someone from republishing your content what good is the law.

Impractical though it may seem, I'll follow someone to the ends of the earth if I have to, to protect my work.

A month or two ago, a couple in Boulder was awarded 1/3 of their neighbor's property, after having grown a garden there for almost 20 years. This is a legal concept known as adverse possession. To take somebody's property - real estate - from them in this manner requires: continuous, open "as if it were their own," and hostile use of that property. It also has to go unchallenged by the bona fide owner.

My non-lawyer worry is that as the public walks away from any copy right or protection, something pretty similar is slowly happening with IP. Most types of law work on precedent, so every time a "little guy" wins a little battle, it has meaning in a larger context.

Hi All -

Hey... here's a new twist in our conversation: in a nutshell, those Google people are at it again. With what? A way to share your favorite posts from your Google RSS reader with your friends. Hmmm. Sounds innocent enough. But guess what? Google gives you a web page with your shared posts on them -- straight from a variety of feeds. Ok. So now I can send you to my web page:
Scott's "Shared Items"

Now what could be the copyright beef in this case? Well, suppose I start to publicize my "page" as a sort of online magazine -- heck, there's even an RSS feed for this shared feed page (talk about redundancy... or was that repurposing?). So is that proper use when it comes to copyright - on a Google feed sharing page. And... what if someone takes the feed from my feed sharing page and uses it... on their feed sharing page? Oh... the madness.

What say you?

- Scott

Interesting thread and some good points.

Copyright law is rather dated and inadequate today. It was created in an era when both creating and violating copyrighted works was difficult (e.g. requiring a printing press). Recent developments such as the implementation of the Berne Convention (under which works are automatically protected; they do not have to be registered to receive copyright - US 1989, UK 1988) have 'democratised' copyright, and the ease of sticking stuff on the internet / the move towards an information economy has pushed things forward even more - everyone's a publisher these days.

It's interesting to look at this from the other side too. The low cost of copying has changed the way we work, and has made us all (technically) into mass infringers - there is a huge gap between copyright law and today's norms. There was a fascinating paper on this by John Tehranian recently:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing.

Link (via BB)

Another example of copyright not working was Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas. She was found guilty of infringing 24 songs and ordered to pay $222,000. This may well have been punitive (basically, she seemed to treat the jury with contempt), but is nonetheless huge compared to the punishment she would have received for stealing 2 CDs from HMV. Ed Felten Ars (It also may be illegal, as there is "no way that Jammie Thomas caused $222,000 of harm to the record industry," and there is a limit (significantly lower than 900 times the $23.76 cost of the songs from iTunes) to the level of damages that can be awarded in such cases. I'm afraid I've lost this link.)

Or consider this post. When I clicked the reply button, I gained copyright over it, and, unless I granted or waived certain rights in the Webmaster-Talk TOS (couldn't find the link to check), I could - according to this site - demand the removal of my post (even if it becomes central to a discussion), demand a share of ad revenue or even sue if the site is moved to another server. (For the record, this isn't on my to do list ) This isn't a great situation - there should be an assumption that I am happy for my contribution to be transmitted and copied broadly within the usage norms of a forum like this on the internet. (Though I may not be happy, for example, if my work were to be published - without my permission - in a book and sold on Amazon.)

Things need to move to a more flexible, less maximalist approach, hopefully reflecting the value people now place on different IP (e.g. music is now considered less valuable (because of P2P), music albums (thanks to iTunes) even less so). Perhaps a CC-like approach would work well. But I dunno really - don't know anywhere near enough about this stuff...

Sorry, what I was originally going to say (instead of my ramble above) was that there are a couple of reasonably effective ways I know of for removing your stuff from other people's splogs and the like.

The first (if the offending site is in the US) is the much-abused DMCA takedown notice, which encourages hosts to take a shoot first, ask questions later approach. Though people may not speak to you afterwards of course

The other is a non-legal approach and can be much easier, quicker and more effective. It's basically to hit them where it hurts - stop their ad revenue. Almost all scraper sites are there to make money, and a lot use Google Ads. Google provides a link to report sites using AdWords on scraped content and, according to a post I read somewhere, this works pretty well.

About a year ago I reported someone who was republishing my content to the Google AdSense team via email. The reply I got was that I had to jump through hoops in order for them to do anything. Google makes a lot of money from those splogs. They could very easily stop most, but they never seem to.

but the key legal question would be what rights are granted, and still held when a person/company publishes an RSS feed?

Scott I agree. I think much of this argument comes down to what rights are you granting by publishing a feed. I have a hunch we're giving away more than we realize, but again I don't know the specific laws. Those laws would likely be very different depending on the countries involved too.

I lend and borrow books all the time. But I get or give them back - only one person can read at a time.

Giving and getting the book back is irrelevant. If you lend the book to someone and they read it they didn't buy it. Just because only one person at a time could read the book doesn't change that the author and publisher isn't getting paid.

I think most of us would see book lending as fine. I know I do. There are some differences with some of the other things we've mentioned. You haven't made another copy of the book and you aren't profiting from lending it.

Impractical though it may seem, I'll follow someone to the ends of the earth if I have to, to protect my work.

I understand the feeling, but I think there are times when in the end this only hurts you more than results in anything productive for anyone. Ultimately your fighting a principle. That can and is very important at times. At other times all it does is cause you more harm than good. Depends on the principle and the potential for a successful outcome.

I think copyright is changing or has to change to some degree because technology is changing. With a printed book you can't easily make an exact duplicate. With a digital book you can. If it's fair use to lend a printed copy of a book to a friend wouldn't it be fair use to lend a digital copy of a book?

However it's much easier to make digital copy than it is to lend and return a physical copy. From the user perspective the same thing is basically going on, but there is a difference because of the copy being made.