Scoble Speaks Out against Reposting Feeds
Many people have different thoughts about whether reposting someone else’s XML Feed (RSS, Atom) breaks copyright law or a licensing agreement. I’ve spoken about this before, too, (but I’m too lazy to look for that exchange or those exchanges now) and had at least one heated debate via e-mail with someone over this topic.
If someone has copyrighted their feed or attached some kind of licensing agreement to it, it is not ok to use that content in a way that goes against copyright law or the licensing agreement.
Robert Scoble’s post shows I’m not the only one concerned about that potential misuse.
Steve Rubel and Jason Calcanis have dealt with similar problems, too.
December 15th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
Robert Scoble mentions in his post that copying the feed un-cited is nasty, but it’s double nasty when all the trackback spam comes pouring in. I’m sorta amazed people use trackbacks… Why offer the ability to link - to link in gobbed, italicized anchor text - from pretty much anyone? Sure you can always edit them in the backend, but I’d rather just disable trackbacks on the blogs I publish.
Anyway. I’ll go away now