http://twit.tv/twil3

And my own analysis of it from 2006.

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/08/29/why-r...

Copyright law is complex in this area, but the implied license notion simply does not favor full RSS scraping.

I have a very clear license on this site that gives away nearly all rights I have in the work I post. However, the few rights I do reserve I do enforce. If you do not enforce your licenses, then they become meaningless.

As far as you frequenting the site goes, I understand, that is your choice. But since you are commenting on a week-old post and most likely found this on Tech Dirt, it doesn't seem likely you were frequenting it before.

As far as why I don't put it in the text, that suggestion actually came from Mike Linksvayer, once again of the Creative Commons organization.

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/06/05/using...

The idea is simple, if anyone wants to legitimately use my content within the context of the license, I am fine with it, however, I don't want to encourage or allow blind “RSS scraping” and spam blogging. If humans want to use my content on their site, that is fine, but spam bloggers are intentionally trying to game search engines and do everything they can to harm content creators, not participate in the symbiosis that is at the heart of CC.

On that note, I do add some protection to my feed via FeedBurner. But I don't see that as wholly relevant to this.

Regarding the abuse of the DMCA procedure, sure, there have been many abuses and I have stood firmly with the EFF and others in battling them. There are countless articles on this site dealing with those issues.

However, the vast majority of DMCA complaints are indeed valid. Even if you believe the worst and most skewed numbers, only a small fraction are invalid even technically, much less materially. The safe harbor protections have helped create the Web that we have today and have definitely been a net positive, something even the EFF recognizes. Furthermore, the law provides very strong penalties for those who knowingly abuse the process, look at the Diebold case, and I encourage those who are truly victims to use those laws.

So is the DMCA abused? Yes, but those abuses are more rare than most believe (you never hear about the thousands of legitimate takedowns, including the over 700 plagiarists I have stopped) and there are good protections in place against those who do abuse the law.

There is an obvious problem with the feed, I grant, thank you for bringing that to my attention, but there is a system in place and it is up to legitimate bloggers and Webmasters to follow the license and up to me to enforce the few rights I do reserve.

It is unfortunate that it came to this, especially since I've gotten to know the person behind the site and realize it was just a mistake, but these things do happen and, in the end, no harm was done.

It is worth noting that Joyent did get the work removed and the site in question truncated its feeds. So they only “went to bat” for about 48 hours.

For what its worth, your RSS feed doesn't cite the CC license; only your website. So anyone using Google Reader, Bloglines, an RSS posting widget, or Facebook, is not likely to know your work is covered under a CC license because its not a part of your feed. Perhaps you can add a link at the bottom of every feed and cite the license? If its a poorly minted RSS aggregator, it will still pick up the reference in the feed. If its stripped away, your case becomes more clear. While CC might not have formalized its RSS policy doesn't mean you can't claim its covered in your feed, right? if it does make a difference, I'd suggest using a different license.

But being practical… No one should suggest you disable RSS feeds – that's crazy and reduces the value of your content. Same with managing whitelists or blacklists to prevent suspects from scraping your work; it ultimately takes too much of your time and you'll accidentally block someone who has a legitimate right to read your work. But adding disclaimers on your site, feed, emails, etc. is one way to extend the protection of the license and it sounds as if a more practical way to deal with this issue is available. Or, only show the first paragraph of your work in the RSS feed. If only the first paragraph is copied, then the syndication of your content will be limited to it. If they show the entire post, then you know you're dealing with a questionable operator and not a poorly thought out content aggregator like a Google or Bloglines wannabe.

I'm sure you can understand me when I say that DMCA takedown notices are abused regularly and ultimately harm both the content creator and the content consumer. At the least, recognize the frequent damage that the abusive use of takedowns have caused us all. Legitimate users are branded as thieves, viral marketing and low cost promotion are stifled, the concept of fair use gets extinguished, and the safe harbors built into the DMCA erode. So while you could argue your content is being stolen, the trail would lead anyone to believe that you are, in fact, the author of such content and not this creator of this questionable website. In the end, we all lose because your content will spread less frequently and we will not be able to communicate without a DMCA threat.