Blogdigger copyright
Blogdigger explains their concern with re-syndicating search results:
“Our Terms of Service state that our search results feeds are licensed only for individual, non-commercial usage, meaning, they are meant to be used by individual people subscribing in aggregators. There are many sites that take content from Blogdigger (as well as other RSS-output services) and automatically post it to web pages in an effort to increase their search engine rankings with folks like Google.”
…they add that this has become even more of a concern when ads are incorporated into RSS feeds.
Also how do you keep track of people re-syndicating re-mixed versions(splicing/filtering) of your feeds, as the RSS feed has a different URL when it is re-mixed.
My query is that the content doesn’t belong to Blogdigger anyway, it belongs to the the various blog owners…but I suppose they supply a service of delivering search results - the content packaged in personlised ways, ie. allow you to monitor RSS content according to your information needs, you can’t do this on a big scale (rss sphere or blogosphere) without a search engine.
I posted earlier the concern with people re-publishing blog content by using Public RSS aggregators…I guess re-syndicating on the sidebar of your blog doesn’t hurt if it is javascript (non-search engine friendly), but there are other re-sydication formats where search engines will index content from your site (that actually originates elsewhere).
But I’m not savvy on advertising so I’m not sure how it works, because if someone re-syndicates your content they will be getting the ads appearing in the website/blog as well, and if they click on an ad won’t that be good for whoever owns the RSS feed?
…For monetary reasons I see ads in RSS feeds as a bonus as now wherever your content is re-hosted people can still click on ads and make money for the original host.
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Good points; regarding the copyright/ads, of course original content owners retain copyright of their content, and we do not modify that content at all, but as you point out, we do provide the service, which is technically where the ads go.
When we first started this, everyone told us that we should send as much of the content along as we could. Since ads in feeds have begun (not just ours, but anyones) this raised a further issue of would a content owner like the ads to be resyndicated or not (if you put Ads for Feeds in Library Clips, its possible we will resyndicate your ad, which will potentiall make you money, not us; and we will never replace your ad with our ad…our ads appear as seperate RSS items). As things mature, it is likely that we will reduce the amount of content coming through our system (in the free, non-commercial feeds), since this is beginning to seem more appropriate.
But you are right to point out, we’re trying to keep everyone’s best interests in mind (which, although not fiat, is a consideration in US copyright law), but the general potential for abuse is there.
Comment by Greg Gershman — September 9, 2005 @ 5:54 am
If you don’t want your content “stolen,” don’t feature RSS feeds. You are supplying a feed so that the content can be resyndicated in any way anyone wants to resyndicated. You should provide RSS feeds only when you assume this will happen, and not complain about it when it does. I think we are going to see more “headline only” feeds soon as a result of ads and “feed stealing.” How can we preemptively keep what happened with e-mail from happening with RSS? Maybe it won’t matter if the content is good enough.
Comment by NickD — September 9, 2005 @ 4:48 pm