Hello Matthew and thanks for visiting Wiggler.gr!
In our podcast section (cause we have a vidcast one as well ;) ) and in our first episode of Newslens podcast, we mentioned the “Google is killing RSS” story from Andy Beard.
In our conversation we discussed the phrase ‘An RSS feed which you subscribe to is your personal subscription to a service, just like email.’ which we agreed that is completely wrong, cause RSS are neither private nor personal, on the contrary they are public!

I translated the comments on the Wiggler page, I don’t know of a way to translate the audio online, so thanks.

Just imagine the following scenario

A news site posts a story, and purchases a license to use an image from Getty Images.
They have the right to share that content with their direct subscribers.

One of those subscribers unknowlingly shares their content in some manner, and the story spreads, along with the image.

A few years later, Getty Images is searching the web archives, and discovers the usage of their image on loads of websites, and kindy requests compensation from every single one of them.

Now the above scenario is fictional, but is based upon fact.

Someone I trust and have had personal communication with had something similar happen. He purchased some software, some kind of script, that also came with a demonstration installation to show customers. It happened to have 3 images used in creation of the header graphic, which I believe the original script developer might have paid for, but it doesn’t matter if he did.

It is all detailed in the following free report

http://andybeard.eu/2006/11/mike-filsaime-social-marketing-copyright-violations.html

I am still awaiting some feedback from a lawyer who is an expert in these matters, but it just so happens the lawyer I have approached was involved in the other copyright violation mentioned in the report, again a document that spread “virally”. It could just as easily have been a blog post.

I am also still awaiting feedback from 2 large media publishers that I approached to comment.

Yuck. That comment tastes spammy.

Matt I don’t gain a link juice benefit from commenting on your blog, whereas when you make a post through to me you do, as I use dofollow.

So what inclination would I have to comment

Maybe I felt I needed to respond to something in the post or the comments, such as…

RSS are neither private nor personal, on the contrary they are public

Based on that report, and my previous knowledge of the incident, I am even thinking about changing the license of my content to full copyright.

I have always used CC, even allowing commercial use with attribution. The problem is I sometimes use images provided by various other people.

Despite using the images in good faith, and for their intended purpose, if somehow the artist they hired used an image from Getty or similar, I might eventually be liable.

Hi, I’m the ” & KCorax” as in Newslens by “Wiggler team & KCorax” :D .

In the podcast we strongly support the idea that — as with many things online — knowing about information is equivalent to possesing it. This is an artifact of the way the web is built and has extensive ramifications, the least of which is the privacy of a feed.

Let me just state that I do agree that one should be able to embed rights information metadata on a feed(as in DRM - yes I fully support the idea).

Imagine however the following scenario:

If I publish a personal calendar with RSS notifications (like in http://www.rsscalendar.com/rss/ ) then anyone who knows the url can subscribe to it. Unlike email, I can’t enable public key encryption - and this is where Andy’s theory breaks: an RSS feed is not meant to be secure either at channel or message level.

Bottom line, I think that defaulting to public blogrolling is plain rude, nothing else.

Sorry I replied hastily and Stelabouras is bitching about it,

Andy,
I noticed you have creative commons metadata on your page. Here’s the deal, RSS 1 is ratified by a standards body and is an RDF vocabulary just like the CC on your page.

RSS 2 on the other hand is ratified in a Harvard law school page (your page links to a Feedburner copy) and the CC xml you use is defined in Userland. Neither is a standards body.

If you intent to sue someone for resusing the content he finds on the feed and not the page it links to then try embedding into your feed the RDF that CC gives you when you make a page. You know the

(oh god why blogs split my comments is just….)
(Matthew please join these two)

… RDF tag that is produced by the creative commons subscription.

Better still switch to RSS1 and use the ratified Dublin Core module and use the dc:Rights tag to embed the cc information.

Even then however you are will propably fail. Copyright violation lawsuits are generally based on things that people can see (at least in Greece) — and this is why one should have the little picture too. Since you can’t control how the RSS is rendered for at least a significant majority of the readers you propably can’t stand legal scrutiny.

Now if you had the feed being empty, and just link to the page…
Well that would work !

Kcorax: You already can embed DRM information in RSS 2. All you need to do is write a spec for your DRM extension, implement the new namespace in your feeds, and get the aggregators to support it. However, that last part will never happen. You can’t make a good business case for it.

Matt,
I’m suggesting that RSS 2 is made up by technophiles not standards bodies. There is no IT science behind it. Sure you can embed anything in it, but it carries no semantics. It’s there for anyone who want’s to see it.

However, that last part will never happen.
Agreed 100%. This is why I suggested RSS1:DublinCore which is a ratified means of embedding rights.

I’m not familiar enough with that spec to be able to discuss it. Does it describe rights that are to be acted upon by the aggregators? Or is it just a description of legal rights?

Regardless, it doesn’t matter whether a spec has been through a standards body or not if it hasn’t been implemented. If what you’re talking about is machine-readable rights, I’m willing to bet that none of the major aggregators support it. No amount of “IT science” is going to change reality.

Like it or not, RSS 2 is the standard syndication format. It got to that position because it has a readable spec, is easy to implement, and has just enough features to get the job done. Standards bodies tend to produce the opposite of that.

The whole semantic web/RDF concept is nothing but a dream until people who do actual work can be convinced of its usefulness.

Kcorax, I am not worried about the copyright of my blog content.

I just clicked a button in Feedburner to provide a CC license there.

The thing is CC is giving rights, not taking them away.

By default everything you create is copyright. You can register copyright, and that gives you additional avenues in law to procecute and receive damages.
A copyright notice does not have to be present

Maybe companies are more sensitive to these issues in Europe, as Google it seems is struggling with. Indexing however is not the same as providing full feed content.
Images seem to be causing Google problems in Scandinavia as well.

One interesting thing I thought of today was licensing my content under GPL.

Robert in his arguements claimed that individual web posts were part of a website, so he could use 10% under “fair use” of all a websites content.

But in software, using any GPL code would make the whole new piece of software liable under GPL.

Obviously that would be ridiculous for a website using one GPL licensed article or even an excerpt of a GPL article, thus each article should be looked on as a complete work under copyright.

Thus an article or individual blog post with fully retained copyright should also class as a complete work.

Some day in the future a large content owner is going to cause some waves, not just in Europe, but Worldwide.

In one of Roberts old post I came across another company working with RSS for other purposes http://www.rssbus.com/

Short quote from their latest update page

Since RSSBus makes it easy to access and publish business data via RSS, we knew that security and access control would be a major concern. As a result we tightly coupled the RSSBus security infrastructure with that of ASP.NET, providing a robust, easily manageable and secure interface that many people are already familiar with and using in their organizations today.

Andy,

I can’t see the copyright anywhere in Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7 or FeedDemon, or Feedburner’s view. I can’t test it anywhere else without getting off my chair or registering to some online reader (and this kills a little bit of me every single time). As far as the visibility argument goes nothing has changed.

A copyright notice does not have to be present

I suspect this is fuzzy in international law. I know for certain that in Greece even your face is protected, so taking someone’s photo can be illegal. The EU copyright commission has gone further to discussing the intellectual property of a building’s looks (makes sense with Reichstag for example). We should ask about that in the cc fora.

The thing is CC is giving rights, not taking them away.

I never implied otherwise. I :heart: cc .

Google isn’t just indexing. They are caching everything ! This really sucks if you work in a media business. As I said it really sad that I have to either exclude the googlebot entirely (and thus not be found on the world’s largest search engine) or allow them to cache your material.

The web.archive.org is even creepier in that respect, they store every single page of your content. What’s even worse is that I can’t specifically exclude my hosted blog since I don’t own the server !

If you implicate GPL in your licence and this goes to court only one thing can happen: It will defended pro bono by RIAA and branded as “protecting the citizens’ rights”. Then after escalating to the suppreme courts where judges will be puzzled with international copyright details and trivialities, it will be somehow connected to child pornography and terrorism. A month later a new DMCA that makes the GPL illegal will arrive and mandatory DRM will be applied to all identifiable original content.

Pretty please don’t do that.

You don’t need RSSBus, you can secure any RSS feed by putting it behind authentication and even SSL. But these are perks you get for being on the web, not specific to RSS. Also they will propably not work over you online reader and my desktop one will ask me for credentials on every visit.

You don’t need RSSBus, you can secure any RSS feed by putting it behind authentication and even SSL. But these are perks you get for being on the web, not specific to RSS. Also they will propably not work over you online reader and my desktop one will ask me for credentials on every visit.

I totally agree that RSS authentication is enough to protect the source of feed content, although you can include the username and password within the URL you access so you don’t have to type it in every time.

A “noshare” tag for RSS feeds would make it harder for people to share stuff they don’t intend to by mistake (Shift S in Google reader), whether it is their private data from 37Signals, or a feed that contains copyright content not intended for mass distribution.

Bloglines works with Authentication, I did a test and shared a 37 Signals feed. If there ws a way to prevent the data being shared (whilst sharing other content) I didn’t see it, though I am not that familiar with Bloglines.
The details would probably appear in a shared OPML file as well.

The amount of programming resources a noshare flag would require are minimal compared to the advantages in RSS uptake worldwide for business use. I suppose most businesses are using custom software to implement RSS sharing of data with customers. That isn’t a good longterm solution, because there are only so many custom clients people are willing to install on their systems, and only so many they will access daily.