Does consuming an RSS feed to another site violate copyright law?

Update: I have re-posted this to today’s date to see if WhereIStand.com will pick it up now that they have corrected a few issues.

I established a site late last year that lasted for about 5 months where I compiled various topics of my own interest together via RSS feeds. I didn’t feel one way or the other about what I was doing until I received an email from someone screaming at me that I was “stealing his content”. Then I felt what I was doing was wrong. Was it alright and I’m simply over-reacting? I don’t know. I open this up for everyone to participate in and share your views on this matter.

The nice person that insisted I was stealing his content wanted me to remove his feed from my site, which I did expeditiously. However, it exposed a glaring issue that doesn’t seem to be getting any airplay at all and my own ignorance on this matter caused some grief among a few blogger’s, which was completely unintentional. I shut the site down for a few reasons, but this was the catalyst.

What is RSS?

In case you’re not familiar with RSS, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is common to blogging software packages. It allows users and sites to obtain the content of the blogs posts and syndicate them elsewhere, either to a feed reader or another site. Every blog these days has a feed available unless the blog operator has disabled or removed the links that provide access to the RSS feed. You will see them as links described as ‘Feed’, ‘Syndicate’, ‘RSS’ or something similar to that.

Blogger’s around the world invest their time and money into their blog. Some make really good money blogging full time, while there are also the hobbyists that do it for fun. The entire blogosphere is comprised of a myriad of different blogs, each with different topics, styles and post frequencies. So being able to compile these under a single banner in different ways is really appealing.

For arguments sake, let’s assume that each and every blog provides an RSS feed to the world (I’m probably 99.9% right on that).

The Issue

Blogger’s provide an RSS feed on their site for others to consume. By providing the feed a blogger is essentially saying “here’s my feed, feel free to use a program to come and grab the content I provide via my RSS feed”. The intent is for people to be able to get updates from the blogger’s site without having to visit the site. Similar to email, you open your reader and update your feeds and see what’s new.

Blogger’s are able to control how many posts go out in the feed as well as how many characters of each post they want to provide. Some provide the full text of their posts while others may only provide a limited number of characters for each post, causing the user to read more on the blogger’s site if they want to read the entire article.

There are many sites around the Internet that consume feeds, compile them together and present them, not as their own mind you, but as the authors with links back to the original source. They simply compile them all together in one nice, neat web site. It’s convenient for those of us interesting in a particular topic and need a variety of opinions or ideas from a variety of sources around a particular theme, concept, idea or topic.

The Argument

If a blogger does not wish his content to appear on another site, do not provide an RSS feed that allows your content to easily be spread around the Internet. By providing the RSS feed for anyone to consume, you open yourself up to your content being syndicated. It may or may not be used how you expect. That’s part of the risk you assume by providing the feed in the first place.

This isn’t any different than syndicating the news on your site from Yahoo! or any other news organization. They provide an RSS feed and/or widgets that do just that, provide their content for display on another site.

Likewise, Google stores a cache of your content on their server and provides that to users performing searches. No one seems to be raising a fit about that. So what makes this so bad when some random site starts doing it with your feed?

The Counter-Argument

Some blogger’s work very hard to provide quality, relevant posts on whatever niche they operate in. If I spend the time to write this content, I also want to be the one being rewarded for my efforts, not Joe Shmoe down the road that is consuming my feed and displaying it on his site.

The Options

After receiving the ‘you thief’ email, I asked a few other about this issue, and it came down to this:

1. Ask the blog owner first for permission. In an honest and caring world, this would work. Unfortunately, that isn’t our world and there are those that don’t care what you think. This isn’t a 100% workable solution. I happen to care, so I removed the site entirely. Would others do this…perhaps. But there will always be those that don’t.
   
2. Limit the syndicated content to only an excerpt of certain number of characters. This works, but do you mind having the first 250 or 500 characters to be syndicated with/without your permission? You would also force your subscribers to visit your site for each and every post they are interested in reading beyond your excerpt.
   
3. Don’t do it, period. Don’t provide a feed. Seems a bit limiting in terms of what people expect from a blog. By not providing the syndication, you are killing off your subscribers as well. That doesn’t fly either.

There doesn’t seem to be any law written about this particular issue and it actually a socialized rule of blogging, however that doesn’t make it right or wrong. It resides in a gray area still.

There are many questions to be asked that are within this post. The most important one I feel is the post topic. Does this constitute a violation of copyright law?

I could probably use some help formulating these arguments a little. Have any ideas?

You might also enjoy these related posts

1. Blogger.com Help – Lesson 13 – Site Feed Settings Your site feed settings administration page in Blogger provides you the ability to manage your subscriber feed. It’s core to the operation of your blog and allows visitors to receive...
2. Blogging 101 – How to Tweak a Bloggers Panties Well, it appears I have finally succeeded in pissing someone off. Roy Osherove’s Blog was recently added into the blogs I regurgitate on AskWayne.net, and this morning after a friendly...
3. AP Goes After Bloggers For Posting Article Headlines And Snippets Just like this one…. Last fall, the Associated Press claimed that it was ready to change to face the new internet world — and that meant not just being a...
4. How to easily inflate your RSS subscriber numbers with FriendFeed I remember when I started blogging a few years ago and thinking about what it will be like when I get a subscriber. It seems that you can wire your...
5. How To Create An Entrecard Top Droppers Widget For Blogger I recently posted on what I, personally, look for before I add a link to my list of sites that I drop on daily. All you need is an Entrecard...