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Legal and Ethical Link Blogging

Started by Jonathan Bailey · 11 months ago

In a recent post on TechCrunch, Duncan Riley sparked a controversy by saying that the blogs created by Google Reader’s linkblog feature “already break copyright and in a small way undermine blogs and content creators.”
That statement resulted in a flurry of co ... Continue reading »

6 comments

  • You are missing out on Google Reader ignoring and removing licensing information contained in feeds.
  • Oh they remove licensing information from the feeds as well?
  • Any data contained in the header of a feed such as the bloglines code for preventing sharing, or the feedburner code to prevent use with Yahoo Pipes gets stripped out by Google Reader when someone shares individual items.
  • Andy: That is a point worth mentioning. I spoke with an attorney friend of mine the other day and she felt Google was on "thin ice" with Google Reader's linkblog tool. I do have a question though, that stripping you're talking about, is it something that appears on every single item in a feed or just in the header of the feed itself?

    I read your great article on the topic but that wasn't completely clear to me.

    Also, just a heads up, your site has a bug in Safari 3 that's causing the sidebar to appear below the text. It could be a glitch with Safari, but I wanted to let you know.
  • The items I listed in my post are all added to the header for the feed, thus it is available to the reader when the content is picked up.

    On my article what I did (and still have in operation) is I used Feedburners own tool to add the no sharing with Yahoo Pipes and no index information, but the Bloglines code would be added in the same place.

    I then shared my own feed contents and linked to it.

    In that shared feed the information is stripped out.

    You can still have information added to your posts with a plugin, but that is not machine readable as I don't believe there is any proposed standard that works with individual feed items (though I could be wrong)

    I understand some of the technology in this, but not like the real technology geeks.

    I think the most dangerous aspect of this isn't text, but licensed images which class as a complete work. You could get away with publishing to subscribers, but not free distribution and reuse elsewhere.

    I know you are not into "marketing" stuff the same way I am, but there was a free report by Mike Filsaime that I encouraged people to download (yes it costs an email address and Mike does send occasional email promotions)

    He has actually experienced a couple of costly legal problems with copyright which are enough to scare people which is why whilst so many bloggers don't agree with me, I keep fighting this uphill battle.
  • Andy: I'm going to download the ebook now and will probably give it a look this weekend if at all possible. You're right that marketing isn't my thing, but I am an advertising graduate so it isn't like there's nothing of interest to me in there.

    That being said, I think I better understand your point.

    What there needs to be is a universal way, built into the RSS standard, to allow people to give the OK for content reuse or to deny it. Ideally, such a system would be able to set flexible rules such as no images, only 250 words or only one article at a time.

    I think the reason Google is stripping out these things is because they aren't in the RSS standard. Still, I do agree they should keep the header information in, it's just clear that improvement is needed on both sides of the fence here.

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