TechEssence.info

It is amazing how portable and remixable our content is these days. Using RSS and JavaScript, I can take content that lives on one Website and have it show up on five different pages. I can even specify how much of the content I want to show up on the page and what I want it to look like. And when I update that content on the original Website, it is automatically updated everywhere else. Using an RSS mixer, I can mix content from 10 different sites and create an entirely new RSS feed that contains content from all of them. By the time I syndicate that content elsewhere, it probably won't look anything like it did before. It may not even be possible to tell where the individual pieces of content came from. The question is, is what I'm doing ok?

Thanks to RSS, content has become so easy to move around and remix, but is it always acceptable to resyndicate or remix other people's content? Where do we draw the line between fair use and a copyright violation? If content has an RSS feed associated with it, does that give people license to republish it wherever they want? This is an issue that will likely be decided in a court of law in the future, but right now, people are pretty much doing what they want with rss-enabled content (which in most cases is not a bad thing).

Most of the people who are reading this article, probably aren't even visiting techessence.info. More than likely, you are reading this in an aggregator like Bloglines or Rojo. RSS has allowed people to read content from a large number of people and organizations without ever having to visit their sites. It has also allowed people to republish content without just cutting and pasting it onto a bunch of Websites. This is all what RSS was designed to do. So if someone has an RSS feed, does that imply that they are consenting to have their content used by others in any manner? Can other people publish this entire post on their own site without giving credit to me? Or even if they do give credit, is it ok for them to use it to draw visitors to their own site?

Many bloggers use a Creative Commons license to explicitly state how their content can be used. On my other blog, Information Wants to be Free, you will see at the bottom of every page a link to the Creative Commons license I've chosen. I allow people to republish my content so long as they give me credit, are not publishing it on a for-profit/commercial site and are willing to license the content in the same way if they make any modifications.

But it's not only blogs that have RSS feeds these days. Many newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals have RSS feeds. These publishers usually are very strict about reuse of their content. In fact, many news providers like the AP get paid to have their content syndicated in other publications and Websites. So if they have an RSS feed, what right do regular people have to resyndicate that content on their page? And what is really the difference between using an aggregator like Bloglines to read RSS-enabled content and aggregating it on your own Website?

While most people syndicate other people's content for educational/informational purposes, there are also people who use the content of others for their own profit. Spam blogs -- or splogs -- resyndicate content from popular Websites to drive people to their blog where they usually have set up Google AdSense or some other pay-per-click scheme. They use the popular content to draw traffic to their own site so they can make money. This would be considered a commercial site and would violate many people's Creative Commons Licenses. But how do you get a splogger to take your content down? There may be no way to track down the creator of the splog and most individuals are not going to jump through the hoops of seeking legal recourse.

Another interesting issue arises when someone uses your intellectual property in a way that does not violate your license, but you don't like the context in which it is used. For example, librarian Michael Sauers has a Creative Commons license governing his online photos. Recently, a PBS blog used a photograph of his -- with the appropriate attribution -- in an article about cell phones and banning them in libraries. While the article appeared to be in support of banning cell phones, Michael does not agree with that stance. This is a fairly mild example, but it could easily get more serious. What if an anti-death penalty individual's Creative Commons-licensed photo is used on a pro-death penalty Website? Would it look like the individual is promoting something they don't agree with? This is a risk we all take when we allow our content to be used by others.

I honestly don't have any answers to these interesting legal questions, but I'm sure the more portable our content gets and the more familiar people become with RSS, the more issues we are going to have with people taking our content and using it in ways we don't like or are downright illegal.