There are tens of millions of RSS and Atom feeds published on the Web. And nearly all of them are copyrighted.
If an author doesn't explicitly give up all rights to a work, which might be a bit tricky,it's automatically copyrighted in the United States and most othercountries. Of course the same is true of web pages. But web pages aremostly intended to be viewed in a browser. Feeds are generallyintended to be syndicated, which means that their content is going tobe sliced and diced in various and unforeseeable ways. This makes adifference.
In what ways is an application allowed to copy and present a given feed's content? To start with, it can do things covered by fair use (*). There are some interesting issues around what exactly fair use means inthe context of web feeds, but ignore those for the moment. What aboutcopying beyond what fair use allows?
It would be awfully helpful if every feed simply included a machine readable license. For example, a <link rel=&q…
If an author doesn't explicitly give up all rights to a work, which might be a bit tricky,it's automatically copyrighted in the United States and most othercountries. Of course the same is true of web pages. But web pages aremostly intended to be viewed in a browser. Feeds are generallyintended to be syndicated, which means that their content is going tobe sliced and diced in various and unforeseeable ways. This makes adifference.
In what ways is an application allowed to copy and present a given feed's content? To start with, it can do things covered by fair use (*). There are some interesting issues around what exactly fair use means inthe context of web feeds, but ignore those for the moment. What aboutcopying beyond what fair use allows?
It would be awfully helpful if every feed simply included a machine readable license. For example, a <link rel=&q…