DISQUS

AndyBeard · 2 years ago

You are missing out on Google Reader ignoring and removing licensing information contained in feeds.

Recording Studio · 2 years ago

Oh they remove licensing information from the feeds as well?

AndyBeard · 2 years ago

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.

JB · 2 years ago

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.

AndyBeard · 2 years ago

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.

JB · 2 years ago

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.