How does copyright law work with RSS feeds? Can they be republished?

November 14, 2005 7:52 PM

What are the legal implications of re-publishing full-text entries from another site's RSS feed? Planet sites do it for mostly legitimate purposes, and spam-logs do it for, well, spammy purposes. But are there any laws that apply? The US copyright code doesn't assume the information is already freely available on the internet, so it seems like a grey area.

It seems as if the proliferation of splogs on the internet is largely dependent on content scraped from other sites’ RSS feeds. Many splogs are hosted on their own domains, and domains must be owned by someone. If they are stealing content from other sites, their owners can be held responsible. But only if it’s actually illegal to repost the content.

How do you license content that is intended to be aggregated, without allowing it to be splogged?

And do you need permission to aggregate a feed on a planet site?

We need a set of licenses that will allow people to subscribe to RSS feeds in web-based readers, but not to republish posts on their splogs. Any legal eagles out there willing to tackle this one? Do any of the CreativeCommons licenses cover RSS in this way? BoingBoing had a rant on the BBC's restrictive/ridiculous TOS for their RSS feeds a while back, but not much legal clarity.

posted by Geektronica to law & government (13 comments total)

The RSS feed typically shows the copyright. The owner reserves rights, but that doesn't mean that the owner has declined to allow the RSSfeed content to be distributed.
posted by acoutu at 8:07 PM on November 14, 2005

You know, I bet if you emailed Doctorow about this he could help you find a bunch of info. He's a pretty busy guy apparently, but this (understandably) seems to be one of his pet interests.
posted by trip and a half at 8:55 PM on November 14, 2005

IP Attorney Bruce Sunstein Discusses RSS Copyright

See Martin Schwimmer for the case that triggered a broad discussion of this topic last spring.
posted by dhartung at 9:11 PM on November 14, 2005

I'm assuming the question is "We need a license, how do we get one?" and not "Tell me about the philosophy of licensing":

If you want a license written by a lawyer, you'll have to pay a lawyer for it. If you don't, then you just need to write down the terms yourself. The default is for you to retain all rights to your work, so there isn't much you need to do; somewhere where people getting the RSS feed links will see, provide a short block of text that says that the feeds are for individual use only in feed readers and that republishing your content is not permitted.

You don't want a Creative Commons license because you don't want people to be able to reuse your content. Creative Commons' point is to encourage people to do the opposite of what you're doing.
posted by mendel at 6:26 AM on November 15, 2005

Cory Doctorow must be a busy guy, like trip and a half said, but he has always answered my e-mails.
posted by IndigoRain at 6:45 AM on November 15, 2005

Well, ok. Here is my take on it.

Your content is protected by copyright as soon as it is fixed on any tangible medium.

But, you must register that material before persuing any legal action.

Technically, it is always safest to get permission before using content. This can be implicit in the form of a CC or other free content license, or explicit in the form of written permission from the copyright holder. Even if you think you might be covered under fair use you don't want to have to prove it in court unless you have the will and the means to pick a fight.

I suspect that what you might want is covered under a CC non-commercial license which uses this language:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

However, if you really intend to persue any kind of enforcement of your copyright claims, you should talk to a lawyer.

Not legal advice of course.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:03 AM on November 15, 2005

Actually, KirkJobSluder above is incorrect, at least in the US, when he/she says that you must register before persuing legal action. This is no longer true, and hasn't been since the Sonny Bono copyright laws came into effect. Fixed in any tangible medium is the sole requirement for copyright, and that's all you need as a basis for a lawsuit.

RSS feeds are a bit of an odd copyright case, in that they seem to be some type of understood distribution right...if someone publishes an RSS feed, I would imagine there is no legal recourse if someone subscribes to the feed for the purposes of reading it. You can license your work however you wish...for my blog, I use a Creative Commons Attribute/Non-Commercia/ShareAlike license. This extends to my RSS feeds, as they are a part of my blog.

This means that, yes, if a splog scraped my feed for commercial purposes, I believe I would have a lawsuit for them. Could I win? Who knows...that's the thing with copyright. You never know if it's legal til after the judge rules.
posted by griffey at 7:27 AM on November 15, 2005

griffey: Actually, KirkJobSluder above is incorrect, at least in the US, when he/she says that you must register before persuing legal action. This is no longer true, and hasn't been since the Sonny Bono copyright laws came into effect. Fixed in any tangible medium is the sole requirement for copyright, and that's all you need as a basis for a lawsuit.

Actually it is correct under current law.

"Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U. S. origin."

"If registration is made within 3 months after publication of the work or prior to an infringement of the work, statutory damages and attorney's fees will be available to the copyright owner in court actions. Otherwise, only an award of actual damages and profits is available to the copyright owner."

You can file the copyright registration the day before filing the lawsuit, but you MUST file the copright registration before proceeding with any legal action (for U.S. works.) And you should file to avoid throwing good money after bad. (Legal fees could easily be greater than actual damages.)
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:37 AM on November 15, 2005

My assumption is that you are producing blog content and want to protect it from incorporation into "splogs", but not prohibit individual people from using RSS aggregators of various types.

mendel misconstrues Creative Commons licensing in that he seems to assume it's only useful to let people copy your stuff. griffey points out that there are a lot of different CC licenses; I would recommend that you use the "Attribute/Non-Commercial" approach because 1) it conceptually prevents use for spam purposes, and 2) it requires a technicality, proper attribution, that splogs almost certainly don't observe and therefore provides and easy way to detect infringement.

However, I believe that griffey is wrong about the need for and effects of copyright registration. Under the CTEA ("sonny bono act"), copyright adheres immediately when you fix your work of authorship in a tangible medium (and a blog should count), but this copyright office circular specifically states that "Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U. S. origin." Now that doesn't mean that splogs have a privilege to infringe your work, but it does present something of a barrier to any enforcement you may want to take. I wouldn't let that get you down, though; if you decide to litigate against any particular offender, you can just go and register the infringed blog post at that time for $30.

As far as the medium goes, the copyright act is neutral on medium of fixation so technically it shouldn't matter if your copyrighted work is distributed on paper or via http or via RSS or whatever. There are interesting legal issues about presumed permission or an implicit license or whatever, but a license (e.g., Creative Commons, or something similar of your creation) would probably be valid if you made sure that people saw it before they got the link to your RSS feed. If you're on some host that automatically provides RSS of all hosted content without referencing any license requirements you provide, well... that's harder, but there's still no presumptive loss of protection (that I'm familiar with) simply for using the RSS protocol.

Not legal advice of course.

Same here.
posted by rkent at 7:46 AM on November 15, 2005

If you run WordPress as your blogging software, this plugin may assist with the problem somewhat.
posted by WCityMike at 9:37 AM on November 15, 2005

The problem to be solved is:

We need a set of licenses that will allow people to subscribe to RSS feeds in web-based readers, but not to republish posts on their splogs.

Creative Commons does not address this problem any more than it addresses how to let people listen to music or reading a book without redistributing or reusing the work it contains.

This problem has nothing to do with RSS and nothing to do with anything other than the most basic application of copyright law; he wants to let people read his content but not use it for any other purpose. The medium the work is fixed in is irrelevant; he just needs to express exactly that.
posted by mendel at 9:40 AM on November 15, 2005

mendel -

We need a set of licenses that will allow people to subscribe to RSS feeds in web-based readers, but not to republish posts on their splogs.

Creative Commons does not address this problem...

With all due respect, have you read the Creative Commons website? This problem is one they specifically aim to address:

Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a "some rights reserved" copyright.
(emphasis omitted)

You can walk through the "choose license" process to specify 1) disallow commercial use, 2) require attribution, and 3) disallow derivative works , and you'll come up with the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license, which addresses these 3 concerns. I contend that this set of permissions is sufficient to deal with the stated problem, that commercial blogs/"splogs" are republishing RSS'd articles without permission or attribution. If there's an additional concern about all redistribution, commercial or otherwise, then I would agree that some alternate licensing scheme is in order.
posted by rkent at 10:10 AM on November 15, 2005

Thanks for the advice so far. I guess I should clarify: I am setting up a planet site, which aggregates some sites that are not, shall we say, friendly toward me. I have enabled comments on the site, because the sites' owners heavily moderate their comments, to the point that dissenting views are not tolerated. The planet site allows comments on their posts (which of course have links to the source posts - it's very clear where the content is coming from). Also, the planet site is totally non-commercial.

The site owners don't really understand RSS, and though they have seen the site, they haven't demanded that I take it down, so I'm just trying to confirm that this is a grey area.

I don't anticipate being sued, and if they insist that I stop aggregating their feeds, I can do that. I won't take it to the point of legal challenge, but I'm wondering: If someone wanted to take this to court, wouldn't Bloglines, Yahoo MyWeb, and other aggregators that republish feeds and allow you to do things with other people's posts be liable for the same thing?
posted by Geektronica at 5:13 PM on November 15, 2005