RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds have made copyright law a lot trickier. RSS was labelled “really simple stealing” at AOL for awhile. There is still no clear-cut legal guide to using RSS on your WordPress Theme as far as reprinting. The legal system provides some protection for search engines but could be seen as giving an okay to content aggregators with Intent to Spam.

There’s a dilemma here: A content distributor sends out content through the use of an RSS feed. The feed is open to whoever wants subscription. One question here - Is there an implied consent to republishing with proper credit on a blog or Website? Plenty of blogs do it. Syndicating content could be considered implied consent.

Another question is - How are spammers set up as aggregators of content to attract keyword-driven traffic and publish only the headline and first line of text and that link to the original source and that make money from AdSense any different from Google and other search engines? Google is doing the same thing, essentially.

I like many people have used a WordPress theme and had a lot of fun blogging. If I make reference to someone else’s blog or article is my WordPress Theme blog violating any laws? Personally, I don’t see how. But legal minds are at work to protect copyrighting so keep your eyes open in the future.

Copyright law has not caught up with the many parts of the internet, including RSS syndication. I believe it would be better for legislators to decide this than a series of judges, but when have legislators been carefully proactive? Maybe not since the Constitutuion.

Copyright holders have taken real issue Google, whose News and Book Search offerings have gotten the company sued in several countries, including the U.S., France, and Belgium. U.S. courts so far have held up Google’s right to index copyrighted content.

Google says its right to offer headlines, titles, and snippets of content is supported by a standing policy to allow content owners to opt out of indexing.

The Google Blog made a statement awhile back - “Even if use of their work would be perfectly legal, we respect the wishes of content owners. For example, if a content owner asks us to remove his or her content from our web search results, we do. If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we take the paper’s stories out. And if publishers would prefer not to have their books included in Google Book Search, we honor their request. It’s simple: we always allow content owners to opt out - quickly and easily.”

Aggregators do not offer an opt-out provision, effectively ignoring any objections from the content owner. Even this may be legal, if there is implied consent.

So it seems RSS on your WordPress Theme is okay for now, and I’m sure there will be a buzz as soon as one judge or congressman says anything.

Terrorism - Faith Based and Petroleum Fuelled?
Arthur Browning