BorCon blog summary
Erwien Saputra contacted me a while back. He wanted to put together a compilation of all the BorCon blogs, and asked permission to use my blog content. (Basically doing what I was trying to do with the BorCon wiki, except unlike me, Erwien actually got it finished.) He got pretty much all the blogs pulled into one place and grouped by category, and it’s now published on BDN. Pretty comprehensive. Check it out.
October 20th, 2004 at 11:16 am
Interesting. By publishing your RSS feed for XML syndication, you have already given permission to at least show the contents of the feed. I guess he might have needed permision to publish more than the feed….
mary
October 20th, 2004 at 12:24 pm
I’ve given implied permission for the sorts of copying that RSS readers do, but that stays on your hard drive. If you want to *re*publish my content, you need my permission.
See http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html for more info about copyrights.
October 20th, 2004 at 2:43 pm
By supplying an RSS Feed to your blog you are giving explicit permission for any RSS READER to consume that information and display it as well provide the link to your actual site. And you must be aware that not all RSS Readers are desktop bound; but some are accessed via a web browser client?
Jamie
October 20th, 2004 at 3:17 pm
Point taken. Yes, if somebody has an RSS aggregator on their Web page, and my blog is in there, that’s fine.
But note that, if they’re aggregating my feed, I would still have editorial control of the content. The post would roll off their aggregator after a while; if I edited the post, the updates would appear on their site; and if I deleted the post (or blocked their IP address), the post would disappear from their site. So it’s different from outright copying.
(Of course, even a public aggregator page would be illegal if I hadn’t given implied permission by providing an RSS feed. Scraping someone else’s page and putting the content on your site, for example, would be illegal.)
If, instead of aggregating, they just copied the content and pasted it on their Web site, that is no longer something I’ve given implicit consent for; even if they linked back to my site, that’s a copyright violation, and they’d need to ask for permission.
October 20th, 2004 at 3:28 pm
Well, then we are in agreement. As I said, you are explicitly giving an RSS Reader the right to consume they content in your RSS feed (that’s the whole point). This in no way gives anyone the right to republish the content on your site beyond that feed (hence the <link> part of the feed).
However, if you think about it, professional cites that quote a portion of another work is in fact not copy-right infringement (otherwise the academic community couldn’t publish); and an RSS item is really nothing more than technologically updated form of the traditional cite…
So in that context, even an "off-line" consumption of your blog content (as long as all due references are preserved) isn’t copy-right infringement (see my "academic/professional cites" example, above).
jamie.
October 20th, 2004 at 3:34 pm
That falls under the purview of "fair use", and yes, it’s allowed within certain boundaries. The "copyright myths" link I posted in an earlier comment goes into more detail on fair use. (I rely on it when I link to someone else’s content and include excerpts in my post. But I can’t, for example, copy and paste their entire post into my blog.)
October 20th, 2004 at 3:37 pm
<<But I can’t, for example, copy and paste their entire post into my blog.>>
Of course not. Agreed.
-jamie