Blog scraping or using RSS as intended?
There’s been some discussion this weekend about sites ’scraping’ Wordpress users blogs and stealing their content. This is something that seems quite common and effects most bloggers at one time or another, but this weekend all the complaints seem to be for sites hosted by unix-fu.org.
Various bloggers, including myself, have complained to the email address given in this entry and have had the offending posts removed. However, in a response post the hosting owner, Kris, has raised an issue about RSS syndication and what the expected use of an RSS feed is.
Kris contends that by publishing an RSS feed for your blog (as is automatically done when you have a Wordpress.com blog) you are granting the right for anyone to use that material on their own sites because “When your blog has an RSS feed active, that is saying to the public ‘feel free to syndicate my works’.” It is his opinion that, provided credit is given in some way, the other site is not breaching any rules.
I must admit that this line of reasoning had not occurred to me. In my mind, and I suspect this is true for many other bloggers, the RSS feed is a convenience to allow people to read your content without needing to visit your site all the time. They load your feed URL into something like Shrook or Google Reader and when you publish something new, it automatically gets delivered to them. An RSS feed is a convenience; I don’t believe that most bloggers are tacitly granting people permission to re-publish their work.
It seems that Kris has been rather snowed under with complaining emails recently and not all of them have been polite in their requests, so you can understand why he’s a little ticked off. But does he have a point about RSS feeds, or is he wrong? Also, are you bothered when a site uses your content in this way - republishing your content, with Adsenses blocks all round it - or are you happy that they use your material, as long as they credit you in some way?
This issue is not going to go away, with more and more bloggers signing up every hour and with more and more opportunities for people to earn money off their blogs encouraging content to be re-published elsewhere, so who is right?
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