There’s a fun debate happening right this very second on WebmasterRadio.fm chat where people are arguing over whether or not the existence of an RSS feed is the same as implicitly granting permission to anyone and everyone to republish your work.
Personally, I’m on the fence on the morality of the issue. It’s wrong and bad to scrape, but I don’t see how you can prevent scrapers from taking your content and running it. You may as well acknowledge that the practice occurs and use it to your advantage by seeding your feed with some back links to your site(s). You can also limit your feed to just snippets of the full articles or even just headlines to make your content less desirable to scrapers.
To try to DMCA every site you catch reprinting your work is an exercise in futility, and you’d have a really tough time suing anyone over it unless:
- Your content is being reprinted/republished by a legitimate/large, money making website, they are claiming they wrote it, and you can prove monetary damages.
- You’re a bored attorney and have lots of time to kill.
- You have a relative who is a bored attorney and has lots of time to kill.
- You’ve got deep enough pockets and a deep enough hatred for a single, particular violator and want to go to war on principle, and you don’t care that you won’t actually win any money (because you can’t squeeze blood from a rock).
Really, unless situation #1 is applicable, it’s pointless to pursue.
Ultimately, I think your best bet is to put all the appropriate copyright claims and notices and restrictions on your site and in your TOS, and then take the proactive measure of sprinkling some back links into your content. Also, not providing the full articles in the feeds, but limiting the feed to just snippets or headlines might help, too.
I would say that sums up the debate well enough.
I would go in the direction that if you publish an RSS Feed, include a copyright code at the bottom of every post that links back to your website, I’ve seen this done on another SEO Blog (I think Graywolf, but I don’t recall).
Anyway, it would be smart since you would get links to the original content and would convince search engines where the content ORIGINALLY came from (in my opinion).
Furthermore, if you’re publishing an RSS Feed, it’s not up to you how others perceive this. Some will go with the ‘moral’ thing if you ask them not to steal your content. Others will steal it anyway.
Also, you can publish an RSS Feed with the title and include the first 250 characters, so it depends on how you publish your RSS Feed when it comes to who steals your content.
i think i’ll have no problem sending out dmca notices all the time. i have google alerts setup and a template dmca letter… i just wish i could email them to blogger instead of fax.
creating the work gives me the copyright and RSS/atom is just a file format i choose to publish so that people can do what they want personally with fair use, but not republish for profit.
No one is arguing that you don’t hold the copyright to your work, and you’re within your rights to send DMCAs to everyone you catch scraping your content.
The questions are: is it worth your time to fight it, and even if you score some minor victories and get your content taken down, is it going to stop the practice in general?
I think the answers to both are probably “no”.
I don’t see why anyone would think just because there is an RSS feed that makes it free game for everyone. Some common sense should apply. But then, we’re not dealing with common sense people if they have to steal material to make it in this world.