Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: I Require Permission

Author:Chuck Shotton
Posted:9/2/1999; 11:28:57 AM
Topic:Automated deep linking
Msg #:10468 (In response to 10452)
Prev/Next:10467 / 10469

There are missing parts to this discussion which may or may not affect how people view it. One issue is the copyright concept of "fair use." As an individual, I can visit a site with my browser (or my own agents) and snarf as much content as I'd like, assuming it is a public site and I adhere to all the site's restrictions regarding public access. That's the whole point of the Web.

The issue that is currently being discussed here seems to boil down to the repurposing of that content for re-publication to others via a different site. Issues of attribution and permission aside, when viewed in isolation, this is likely a misappropriation of copyrighted material if done without permission. A site that was a victim of this sort of misappropriation would have every right to be upset and take whatever recourse they felt was justified. Dave's clearly within his rights and expectations to require that permission be granted first before someone scrapes and repurposes his content on their site. Anyone who puts effort into creating original content for their site would/should expect the same.

The second issue is RSS and how it is viewed with respect to other content on a given site. It's really nothing but a more parsable form of some of the content that is already on my site. I, personally, would consider my RSS file to have the same copyright protections as any other content on my site. Just because it happens to be more structured than some of the other content shouldn't be viewed as implicit permission to repurpose and rebroadcast it. As above, it's fair use (and its intended use) for an individual to take that RSS data and turn it into something useful for their own consumption. I think it enters into a very grey area for a site to take the RSS content and repurpose/redistribute it.

In truth, I really hadn't considered the subtleties of RSS until I sat down to write this note. I certainly leaned more towards the mindset that "RSS content is fair game, since it's made for agents." But if you consider that it isn't any different than HTML content on your site, then even what Netscape does with RSS is pushing it a bit (pardon the pun.) As long as it is clearly attributed to the original site and is left in the form that the original site intended, I doubt anyone has a big complaint. But dissecting RSS or otherwise smashing into a new form and representing it as your own content could certainly be construed as a copyright infringement by some copyright holders.

Maybe the right way around this RSS issue is for the RSS standard to incorporate a "fair use" tag that explicitly defines the copyright holder's expectations on how the RSS data can be used in a machine-readable form. That way, RSS authors that want the integrity of their data maintained along with proper attribution could set the appropriate flag, while others who didn't care how the data is repurposed could indicate that as well. Maybe add another attribute describing redistribution permissions and you're done.

The solution for deep linking, HTML scraping, and similar ilk boils down to what Dave says. "Ask first." RSS issues may be better solved by using the RSS file itself to "Tell first."

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