Comments on: Why RSS Scraping Isn’t O.K.

By: Content theft and other dastardly deeds

Content theft and other dastardly deeds — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:14:07 +0000

[...] just in case you’re not convinced that this sort of thing is wrong, here’s what Jonathan Baily from Plagiarism Today has to say about it: … scraping is a classic example of what is not fair use. It takes the [...]

By: PlagiarismToday » Legal and Ethical Link Blogging

PlagiarismToday » Legal and Ethical Link Blogging — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 22:05:11 +0000

[...] talked several times on this site about why RSS scraping is not acceptable. Yet, many in the pro-syndication camp continue to talk of implied licenses or variations of the [...]

By: My Fifteen Minute Break » A question about mashups and CreativeCommons licenses

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 15:19:44 +0000

[...] I did a cursory search of the web and found an interesting article by Jonathan Bailey which suggests that rss feeds are, by definition, public domain protected, syndicated property and should be respected as such. (thanks for the correction). [...]

By: PlagiarismToday » TWiL Discusses Implied Licenses on RSS Feeds

PlagiarismToday » TWiL Discusses Implied Licenses on RSS Feeds — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 13:57:32 +0000

[...] guest Jason Calacanis, blog entrepreneur and former head of Weblogs Inc., the panel reaches roughly the same conclusion that I did back in August, that there is no implied license to scrape RSS [...]

By: PlagiarismToday » Why My Feeds Are Full

PlagiarismToday » Why My Feeds Are Full — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 22:56:36 +0000

[...] What is worse than the debate itself is the tendency among some in it to blame the victims or RSS scraping because they chose to use full feeds. Whether it is a misguided notion that everything in an RSS feed is fair game or that the victims were “asking for it” is not important. [...]

By: Ja

Ja — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 04:49:07 +0000

All the same, people that are putting out new “standards” I feel should have a responsibility to put some safeguards in place. I’m not talking RSS though… I mean Microformats and the like.

I was on a site of a 16 year old kid that made dapps to search for hreviews and hcards and on this site Wordpress site of his, he had more microformat markup than even Tantek uses. The short of it is, just by getting the metadata he put on his pages I know exactly where he lives down to the street and house number. And people are just worried about MySpace, heh.

People are very excited about the microformats and the semantic web but don’t take the time to think about exactly what they’re exposing themselves to and the developers either don’t care or haven’t really thought it through themselves.

I do have faith this will settle itself one way or another. One thing that could be looked at is security schemes but that would limit the exposure people get which they’ll have none of I’m sure.

I’m not defending sploggers or plagiarists the least bit but I am suggesting you don’t leave your front door wide open in a bad neighborhood.

J�?

By: Ja

Ja — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 04:49:07 +0000

All the same, people that are putting out new "standards" I feel should have a responsibility to put some safeguards in place. I'm not talking RSS though... I mean Microformats and the like.

I was on a site of a 16 year old kid that made dapps to search for hreviews and hcards and on this site Wordpress site of his, he had more microformat markup than even Tantek uses. The short of it is, just by getting the metadata he put on his pages I know exactly where he lives down to the street and house number. And people are just worried about MySpace, heh.

People are very excited about the microformats and the semantic web but don't take the time to think about exactly what they're exposing themselves to and the developers either don't care or haven't really thought it through themselves.

I do have faith this will settle itself one way or another. One thing that could be looked at is security schemes but that would limit the exposure people get which they'll have none of I'm sure.

I'm not defending sploggers or plagiarists the least bit but I am suggesting you don't leave your front door wide open in a bad neighborhood.

JÄ?

By: JB

JB — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 22:01:41 +0000

The victim-blaming element of it was one of the reasons that I decided to write this. I'm tired of scrapers blaming vicitms just because they provide RSS feeds.

"It's not my fault that I copied all of your content and put it on my site, it's yours for making it available."

Poppycock.

I'm glad that it helped you out and gave you some ammunition to fire back with!

By: JB

JB — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 22:01:41 +0000

The victim-blaming element of it was one of the reasons that I decided to write this. I'm tired of scrapers blaming vicitms just because they provide RSS feeds.

"It's not my fault that I copied all of your content and put it on my site, it's yours for making it available."

Poppycock.

I'm glad that it helped you out and gave you some ammunition to fire back with!

By: Tammy

Tammy — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 19:02:20 +0000

Thanks for this great analysis of the second “S” and fair use arguments. It’s concise and really helpful to clearing up my own understanding of some of these issues. I had the “it’s your own fault you syndicated your feed not my fault I used it” argument used on me by a scraper last April. Now I can hand over a good web link to support my points!