Not getting it
I've seen a lot of dumb posts, but this one, by mgreenly is right up near the top of the stupo-meter:
Scoble went on a witch hunt today because some one was scrapping his blog content and re-using it. The problem is he's syndicating 100% of his content in his RSS feed. Which means he's all but signed a letter of permission for the public re-use of this content. Even worse in this particular case it was being re-used with attribution and a link back to his actual blog.
Hmm. So a book is an invitation to photocopy, then? How about a newspaper - is that a license to copy too? How about CDs - are those a license to rip and redistribute? How about web pages - are they a license to scrape and redistribute?
Which part of copyright law is this guy not clear on? The ease of copying does not change who owns the copyright. Fair use allows for copying for personal use. It doesn't allow for unrestricted redistribution without permission - and the things Scoble is pointing to don't fall under fair use, IMHO.
Comments
The legality of republishing RSS Feeds
[Jeff Moore] August 27, 2006 23:59:20.061
When I posted about a case of The legality of republishing RSS feeds on my blog I found out that the issues here are really very muddy. For example, is an online newsreader, such as bloglines allowed to make a copy of content from your feed when acting as a user agent? What about the boxes on the right hand side of slashdot? Do those require permission from the feed publisher before slashdot can re-publish them on their site? Or, is the fact that they provide a feed permission enough? After all, the last S in RSS stands for syndication. In your CD example, you are allowed to copy the CD. You have an implicit license to copy the bits from the CD into RAM of your CD playing device for the purposes of playing the CD. In the same way, by making a web page available from a public server via HTTP, you grant an implicit license for a user agent to access that server and make a copy of the content for the purposes of allowing the user to interact with that content. Again in the same way, when you put a feed on a site, you grant an implicit license to use the contents of that feed. What is not clear is exactly what rights that implicit license grants. To read in NetNewsWire? To read in Bloglines? To aggregate ala planet smalltalk? To republish?
Personal Use?
[ James Robertson] August 28, 2006 0:47:40.615
Comment by James Robertson
BlogLines manages syndications for you, but it's still a personal use on the part of the person using BlogLines. I really don't think RSS/Atom makes it any different than paper or a website.