Benjamin Golub

Details? - Hutch Carpenter

ouch! how? - directeur

AP related? - Mo J.

No; some random blogger who was shared twice in RSSmeme and didn't want to be. I deleted her from the site and told her to turn of full content feeds for her blog if she didn't want it in RSSmeme and explained how it all works (most people don't understand that it is through Google Reader *shared* items, they think I'm stealing). - Benjamin Golub

Benjamin: do you feel someone has the "right" to request their content be forever removed from RSSmeme without having to change the way their feed is set up? - Robert Seidman

I told her it wouldn't be forever. Basically I just wanted her off my back so I deleted the entries but made sure she knew that if someone shares it again there is nothing stopping it from coming back. It's up to her now. - Benjamin Golub

I didn't think you republished full feeds? (BTW great service). On the page now, all I see are extracts, which is fair use. Could you share any more details? - Duncan Riley

Give me a break... does she disable my right-click on her blog too...? - Kenneth LeFebvre

Duncan; the RSS feeds are republished in full and you can click on "Preview: none some all" to set you preview level (to no content, some content which is the default, or all content). OR you can click on "read more of this story" under each story in the "Explore" section to dynamically load the full content. - Benjamin Golub

Oh NO! Is there anything we can do to help? - w0nk0

That's odd. What's her complaint? Why would being on RSSmeme bug her? It's only extra attention for her post, not taking away page views. - Hutch Carpenter

That bites but glad I found out about your service looks great. - Mark Forman

Ah...the Shyftr type of complaint maybe? Didn't even know about full feed. Is she an ad-supported blogger? - Hutch Carpenter

Benjamin, then I'm afraid you don't have a leg to stand on. You're reprinting content in full without permission and for commercial use. The Google Reader argument doesn't work: this is public, for profit reprinting. Have you ever seen an ad on GoogReader? There's a very good reason you haven't. - Duncan Riley

Duncan; so I'd be safe if I disable full content then? - Benjamin Golub via fftogo

Sigh. Here we go again. :-) - Louis Gray

another one reposting full content - wheeeeeeeeeeeee - Allen Stern

Well Louis...it is Thursday, and tomorrow is Friday, followed by the weekend... - Hutch Carpenter

Yes, Hutch, you are right. - Louis Gray

If there are no ads, how is this a problem? Does that mean Feedly can be sued, too? Any site that acts as an RSS reader, for that matter... - Rahsheen™

Duncan: Whatnow? Google Reader would be illegal if they put ads in? there's a simple case to be made here that if people create a syndication feed for their site there's implicit permission for people to read the content of that feed in another context, monetized or not. To say otherwise would be to deny the legality of any feed reader that either carries advertising or can be purchased. - Kevin Fox

And Kevin's response, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what I've been saying for months. - Louis Gray

Kevin, your opinion is that it's implicit. Obviously, Benjamin shares your opinion. But I don't think it will be over with until it's fact, not opinion. My opinion is that if *I* am trying to make money off my content anything that can attain a higher page rank and allow my content to rank higher on their site than my own site on a Google search is explicitly NOT ok. Admittedly realistically this excludes 99% of actual blogs, but still....OK, now what? :-) - Robert Seidman

Kevin. Bollocks + thats the exact same argument that has been used by spam bloggers for years. There has always been a difference between private use and public for commercial use. Could you walk into Borders, photocopy an entire book then republish it for profit? seriously? But you could walk into a library and take a photocopy of a page from a book and if you didn't republish that you'd usually be ok - Duncan Riley

Benjamin, absolutely. The extracts are fair use. Reprinting the full content is a DMCA waiting to happen. Take a look at the Topix story if you need some context/ history is terms of what you can and can't print, as they've been to court before. - Duncan Riley

My other suggestion: ask for full reprint rights. I'm actually sure many people wouldn't mind, but you can't presume that those rights exist by default because they don't. - Duncan Riley

@Kevin, so by that line of thinking, the billions of spam blogs (splogs) are okay. I'm not okay with that. - Jason Kaneshiro

+1 for FF producing actionable conversation that could quickly help an entrepreneur. What's this ... crowd-solving? - AJ Kohn

RSSmeme is displaying no full content for the time being; I might change this after I have time to research my rights. For now it's dinner time! - Benjamin Golub

What does pagerank have to do with the law? Saying you put a full-content feed online but will pursue legal action on anyone who puts that content into a feed reader is like saying you published a website but people aren't allowed to read it in a browser that costs money. - Kevin Fox

Rahsheen: in feedly, we are exploring a different path. A combination of: we offer an API for the publisher of the content to surface their ads next to their content (and it will be only their ads next to their content). The same API will allow them to also turn off the full display of their content in feedly. We are going starting next week to put a forum together to talk to publishers and better understand their needs and see if this combination is a good thing or a bad thing. - Edwin Khodabakchian

Feedly - good move. Suddenly the perception on the blogger's part goes from "they're copying my content" to "they're helping me monetize." That's one avenue for RSSmeme to explore. - Jason Kaneshiro

Kevin let's assume I, site a.) want to make money on my site. Let's say site b.) republishes my work in full. Because of the way pagerank works site b.) ranks higher in Google for my work than my own site and gets more traffic to "my" content than I would. I'm not saying it's evil, but it hardly seems "fair". - Robert Seidman

Jason: I tend to agree with Kevin... in spite of the spam blogs, which I also despise. There's real, measurable value added by such sites as RSSMeme and Google Reader, that is worth being rewarded. The publisher of an RSS feed always has the option to include advertising within the feed itself, if they don't consider the publicity their feed is getting to be remuneration enough. They can also lock down their feed with a username/password and provide credentials to their properly licensed users, if they want - Kenneth LeFebvre

Taking the conversation out of the walled garden: http://tinyurl.com/5t2epy - Louis Gray

I just want to clear up what I believe should be obvious but isn't being expressed. You all believe that RSSMeme and the Google Reader Shared page have similar issues. Google Reader itself is a tool that allows you to read content published on the web. It has more in common with a Browser than it does a Billboard. Google Reader's Shared Page is a republishing of content, full or abbreviated. I believe Kevin is talking about Google Reader and the folks on the other side are talking about the Shared Page. - Andrew Burd

Consider - what's the bigger challenge - bringing about a sea change of copyright perception in the blogosphere, or adjust the startup's business model to fit the perception - whether it's misguided, or not? It may depend on how much time the startup has before they must start turning a profit - what battles are worth fighting. - Jason Kaneshiro

I have nothing to add to the discussion WRT whether or not its legal to reprint feeds aside from the fact that I see nothing wrong with it. If you publish a feed for syndication, expect the thing to be syndicated.<nitpick>@Louis FriendFeed is by no means a walled garden. Nobody has to sign up to see this conversation. </nitpick> - Erica Baker

@Erica, I know. it's a garden with a very small hedge. :-) - Louis Gray

@Jason, whether it's a "bigger challenge" shouldn't be the rallying cry. You shouldn't settle on principle because it's the easy way out. If you have a strong opinion on this, you should make it known, and then keep making it known, and hope someone has the opportunity to try and convince you otherwise, or you for them. - Louis Gray

Saw Louis Gray's post on this. I personally publish full feeds, knowing full well that they can end up anywhere (and they have ended up at a lot of bizarre linkbait sites), but I chalk that up to the cost of conversing. - Ontario Emperor

I can't for the life of me figure out what this is all about...? If you wanna be on the Net and publish stuff and enable feeds on it, expect it to be shared and "fed upon" far and wide. Otherwise build a static website without RSS feeds. Heat. Kitchen. and all that. Dont these people know how the intartubes work *gawd* Cry babies over content being fed upon, then stay off the net FFS!!! - Mario Olckers

Mario: Don't you agree that there is a difference between consuming content through a feed reader and republishing the content on the net? You and others may be willing to allow fully republished articles with ads but you shouldn't expect everyone else feel the same. The internet doesn't "work" if no one can afford to publish their content because of leeches. - Andrew Burd

@Andrew, playing devil's advocate, but why should we pay for content at all? Why should content necessarily be something that producers can "afford to publish" or not? Is the cost of publishing your hosting plan and bandwidth? Does the fact that you pay for those things as a necessity to publish entitle you to expect others to pay you back for what you offer them? - Lindsay Donaghe

The scary part is that at some point (not this time), this will probably tested in court. The scarier part is that, on numerous occasions, I've seen judges rule the wrong way (without any doubt) when it comes to the Internet. It goes on and it's a waste of time and money because of the international nature of the Internet. If you don't want to republish, lose the feed. Agree totally with Kevin - Implicit plays here. - Charlie Anzman

Lindsay: Someone's paying for content delivery whether it is you personally or not. Yes that cost is hosting and bandwidth. Those are semi-fixed costs that don't include man-hours. Having said that... I don't think a content re-publisher owes you anything. As they shouldn't be doing a full content re-post for profit at all. Granted you should allow a content generator to get the ad credit for practical purposes, it is also an ethical issue... - Andrew Burd

continued... It just seems icky to me that someone would make any money off of someone else's copyrighted content. - Andrew Burd

A related problem here is that in publishing content online, there is no build-in structure or "tag" that indicates the terms or license under which the content is being published. Creative Commons is trying to get to this, but right now all it is, is a link on your page. How many sites like rssmeme currently notice the cc link at the bottem of my blog, process the cc version I am linking too, and adapt their republishing behaviour accordingly, to take the cc "rules" into account. For example, I would be dissapointed if rssmeme -didn't- republish my content in full, but -with- attribution... so this goes both ways too. - Robert Kloosterhuis via fftogo

paying for content, getting paid to create content, both trending to zero ... separately, the page rank game is what has produced scraping and splogging ... - Gregory Lent

When publishing an RSS feed, there is an implied license to use that feed within the context of an RSS reader. Claiming otherwise would be like making a Word document available and suing Microsoft for "republishing" when someone views that document in Word. However, what there is arguably NOT an implied license for is taking that feed, and republishing it on another web site (commerical gain doesn't matter, although it would lead to punitive fines if it ever went to court). - Ian Betteridge

This goes back more than 18 months when I first attacked rampant sharing in Google reader, or later demonstrated how Facebook status updates can be shared. Last I checked Google Reader was still modifying shared content, stripping out usage information when items were shared. I don't mind it, I even encourage people to do it with my (public) content. - Andy Beard

@duncan - Speaking of Topix, there's a story out about how they've aligned with 6 content providers. Of course, in this case, the parties have agreed to the information sharing... - Ontario Emperor via fftogo

I prefer to take a resigned approach to this. If you publish content on the web, having it stolen and used for monetization is just part of the game. It's not like I have a limited supply of the post I've written, and I'm going to run out of stock if it's stolen. Trying to prevent content theft often costs much more than actual losses incurred. I know others will disagree, but that's my approach. - Dewald Pretorius

If publishing a feed implies permission to view the contents in a feed reader, we have to decide whether a web site is a feed reader. Client vs server side is not a good distinction these days. So what's the difference between republishing and simply providing a nice UI? I've seen similar issues come down to the path the data takes, but I think that misses the point. One possible distinction is whether the user explicitly requested content from that feed. That has problems, but they have workarounds. - seth

if you don't want people to read your content, don't put it up for free on the web ... if you don't want people to read your content elsewhere than on your web page, having an rss feed is kinda stupid as that's what they're for ;) if you really want specific people to be able to read your content in an rss reader, password protect it or something. To me it just sounds like someone not paying attention to what they were doing. - imma - immaterial