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June 16th, 2005

What can we do with your feed?

No, not an agricultural question, but rather one raised by Adrian in the comments below when he said:

“Ultimately if your RSS feed is published on your website you are asking for it to be included in all kinds of services both christian and not so I am surprised by this level of concern.”

Hmmm. But is there a limit to what you are allowing? When you publish a feed* for your blog, what are you happy to happen to it?

1. Be used via an aggregator on someones computer which allows someone to privately browse your content on their computer.
2. Be used for an online aggregator like Bloglines which allows someone to browse your content via their own private account on a website.
3. Be used as content on someone elses website with your permission and attributed to you.
4. Be used as content on someone elses website without your permission but still attributed to you.
5 Be used as content on someone elses website without your permission and not attributed to you.

I think anyone who publishes a feed is happy for 1 and 2 to happen. By definition if asked they will be happy for 3 to happen. 5 is clearly theft and is unacceptable. Buit what about 4? And is there a difference between 2 and 4?

*In case you don’t know what a feed is this is a sort of an explanation from Bloglines, the aggregator I use: “Many online information sources, including web sites, weblogs and news services, now broadcast their content to the web in so-called “syndicated feeds” or “news feeds” with new technologies like Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and ATOM. News aggregator software and services collect those syndicated feeds and present them to end users in a variety of ways.”

I’ll do a post about subscribing via Bloglines for the confused and / or baffled as it really is as easy as clicking the button to the right there, but in the meantime my one about subscribing via My Yahoo or MSN is here.

5 Comments »



This is a single Cartoon Blog entry, posted by Dave on Thursday, June 16th, 2005 at 10:04 pm.

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5 Responses to “What can we do with your feed?”


  1. Darren says:

    Interesting, but not sure what the answer is as to what is OK and what is not. Including extracts from a blog on a site is ‘like’ quoting someone but at the sametime is also different.

    Bloglines is great but made the mistake of including the BBC news feeds in my account. Means everytime I log onto Bloglines I have over 300+ news items in my BBC folder.

    Also how does soemthing like del.icio.us rank in all this. Basically creating a virtual library of linked pages, that all can see. Sorry I’m rambling (trying to put off some editing)

    June 17th, 2005 at 9:37 am
  2. Wallo World » The Blogdom of God says:

    [...] without request.  For example, Dave Walker of Cartoon Church blog identifies this as an issue of what others can do with one’s RSS feed.  H [...]

    June 17th, 2005 at 5:50 pm
  3. Angel says:

    I came over because someone thought you might be interested in the aggregator that I am starting, but I wanted to chime in on this discussion.

    Content on your site is yours as long as it was created by you. Anyone can link your site legally. They are doing nothing wrong. But, in the case of an aggregator that would pull your content onto another site, with or without credit to you can be illegal if done without your permission. It would be a violation of copyright law.

    Just my 2 cents for the topic, not the discussion. If that just made sense. :)

    June 17th, 2005 at 6:46 pm
  4. Tim says:

    Doesn’t it all depend on the permission you give? I.e. if you slap a plain copyright notice on it then no use except linking or quoting for the purpose of discussion is permissible without permission (with or without attribution). But if you use a Creative Commons license then you choose what others are allowed to do.

    The problem is not what people are allowed but what they can and, once you offer RSS, they can (indeed this is surely the purpose of RSS) take and reuse your content (remember RSS = Really Simple Syndication)! So in a sense you have encouraged it by using the blog engine – it is designed to let anyone reuse your content.

    That is speech that is really “free” in every way and sense.

    June 17th, 2005 at 7:10 pm
  5. Dave says:

    The Wallo World article link from comment above is good actually.

    It raises amother scenario, that of the content being attributed but the link being included in a group that you don’t want to be part of or didn’t choose to be part of.

    Darren, I think delicious is a splendid site. Personally I think I prefer to keep my bookmarks on my computer though or blog them if they’re worth blogging, but I can see the attraction of having it all online.

    Thanks Angel, all the best for your aggregator.

    Tim, I have a copyright notice on this site but that is mainly because of the cartoon images which people otherwise use willy nilly without remembering the artist has to make a living. But I have a lot more to say about this in the coming weeks. I’ll be giving bloggers a bit of leeway to include a sample image, I just need to decide how to do it. But that’s another subject really.

    June 17th, 2005 at 7:19 pm