Back in the dark days before the turn of the millennium, if you saw something I had written, down at the bottom there would be a little addendum: “Join my email update list.” If you did this, you would get a copy of every new essay or story I wrote at the time that I made it public. Not as convenient (or as annoying) as a Listserv, but you wouldn’t have to scrounge around on Usenet to find my deathless prose. Back then, a lot of people distributed content this way.
Dave Winer, the Tesla of weblogging, saw how stupid this was and invented a much more efficient alternative: RSS syndication. Instead of an email pushed from an email client, an email of updated content was pulled from a newsreader. Not only would I not have to undertake any special effort to send the email, you could receive it only if, as and when you wanted it. Genius!
What’s important about this is that, from the standpoint of my copyright to my original content, nothing has changed. Before I was pushing emails to individual readers. Now individual readers are pulling emails. But, simply because an RSS feed is easy to obtain, easy to repurpose, easy to resyndicate — this does not imply that I have waived any rights to my intellectual property.
People sometimes argue that RSS syndication creates a gray area in IP law. It doesn’t. In the United States, a transmissible work of the mind is presumed by default to be copyright protected. The presumption is rebuttable — for example by a waiver of copyright. But if you have not waived the rights to your work, you do not need to assert them by filing a copyright notice or by appending a copyright symbol to your work product. Your work is yours, and, except for fair uses for non-commercial purposes — e.g., a quote with a link in a weblog post — no one has the right to republish your content without your expressed permission.
So: Your fine young weblog gets splogged: Your feed is “scraped” and republished with a lot of creepy Read more
