RSS on my Site?

needin4mation.RemoveThis@gmail.com wrote:

> Is it or is it not ethical or illegal to put RSS feeds on one's site

Ethical and legal would be equivalent here.

As always, the feed is the copyright of the person who creates or owns
it, until they either license it to you, assign that copyright
elsewhere or place it entirely in the public domain.

The precedents for web publishing are that content (unless stated
otherwise) has an implicit licence to read it (and the caching storage,
retransmission etc. needed to do so) but _not_ to recycle it onto other
sites. RSS is different though - the intention of the protocol is for
syndication, the implied intention of the publisher is that it shall be
re-used by syndication, and the mechanisms for labelling any protection
beyond this are so self-evident that their non-use can reasonably be
interpreted as consent to allow its use. Of course this is still a
matter of legal opinion, and if BigBlueChipCo wants to be stupid about
it, then they can sue you anyway (they may well be wrong, you can
construct a good legal defence against them, but they'll probably win
anyway).

For most of the web it's copyright and _protected_, unless labelled
otherwise.

For RSS it's still copyright but licensed for you to _use_, unless
labelled otherwise.

Of course RSS can be very strictly protected, and there are ways to
mark it as such (read the RSS / Atom protocols and the Creative Commons
site for good ways to do this). Some blogging sites even claim
copyright over other peoples' work, which they merely publish. If you
want to build a protected. restricted or pay-per-view RSS feed, then
the tools are certainly out there.
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