RSS and Copyright, circa 2006
There's been a flurry of posts and comments on a topic I've long been watching, which is the status of copyright and syndication technologies. It's arisen this time in the context of a project that I'm involved with outside of my Harvard work, called Top10 Sources …
Context & Ripple Effects
The question of who owns what travels through a feed flared up a month ago when Concurring Opinions asked what would happen if copyright law were strongly enforced in the blogosphere — a hypothetical aimed at a publishing culture built on wholesale quoting. John Palfrey's post moves it from hypothetical to live dispute: he is answering critics of Top10 Sources, the aggregation project outside his Harvard work, whose republication of others' posts drew a pointed "Stealing Your Content?" response on Business Logs the same day.
The timing matters because the infrastructure underneath is still unsettled in practice as well as law — panelists at the Blog Business Summit in October 2005 noted that Molly Holzschlag could not even locate a blog's RSS feed, evidence that the industry has not standardized how syndication works at the surface, let alone what rights attach to it.
First-order effects
- Palfrey and Top10 Sources are under immediate reputational pressure to state what permission they rely on when aggregating bloggers' full-text feeds, with Business Logs framing the project as potential content theft.
- Bloggers publishing feeds now face a concrete choice their licenses never anticipated: keep full-text RSS and accept uncontrolled reuse by aggregators, or truncate and fragment their own distribution.
Second-order effects
- Rival aggregation and syndication services will be pushed toward visible licensing terms — Creative Commons-style permissions or partial feeds — because any operator seen as taking more than it asks for inherits the same accusation Top10 Sources is fielding.
- Feed publishers' defensive move toward excerpts or ads inside feeds shifts value back toward destination sites, weakening the aggregator value proposition just as commercial RSS products are trying to establish themselves.
Third-order effects
- If the enforcement debate hardens instead of resolving informally, syndication rights get written into machine-readable terms attached to the feed itself, making licensing metadata part of the plumbing of the open web rather than an afterthought.
The trend: Syndication technology is spreading faster than the copyright norms that govern it, pushing publishers toward explicit, machine-readable licensing as the default resolution mechanism.