How Reuters Should Be Responding To The AP's Suicide | Hacker News Reader

How Reuters Should Be Responding To The AP's Suicide

techdirt.com

25 pointsmariorz19 comments

"Dear AP: your RSS feed is for syndicating your stories. If you don't want the content out there, don't syndicate the content!"

Have to disagree there. Just because my blog has an RSS feed, doesn't mean you can repost the contents on another site.

As someone who has had spam sites set up based on my feeds, it's pretty friggin' annoying.

Yes, the difference is between Joe User who just wants to read the news in his RSS reader rather than in a browser window, and Jane Website who takes the content and republishes it to her own users with her own ads pasted over the top. I don't see how the latter case is any different from someone including GPL code in their own proprietary product. You might as well say if they didn't want the source code out there, why did they publish it...?

>Yes, the difference is between Joe User who just wants to read the news in his RSS reader rather than in a browser window, and Jane Website who takes the content and republishes it to her own users with her own ads pasted over the top

And where does that leave services like google reader? If they decided to start using ads, in which of the two groups would you put them?

RSS readers are relatively new and will probably evolve in unpredictable ways. The distinction between what is a "feed reader" and what is a "web site" is already outdated.

Absent any other license, it depends on how the courts define "redistributing" and "copying."

The useful distinction is probably between "republishing attributed content" and "plagiarism".

Not really. If I share a Metallica album on a P2P network it's fully attributed, Lars Ulrich still wouldn't be happy about it.

I'm talking about RSS.

Exactly. The real distinction is republished with permission, and republished without permission. The beauty of GPL is that you explicitly give permission. On a wider rant, the open source movement is not for people who want to ignore copyright, it is for people who value intellectual property so much they go to great lengths to explicitly share and build only on the work of others who have shared.

I can understand your complaints. But syndication (the last S in RSS acronym) means exactly that. And that's what the protocol is intended for. Feed readers came later.

Posting your content in RSS means you allow anyone to read it. It does not mean you have granted permission for it to be copied and reposted - as the copyright holder, others have to ask you for the right to copy the content. The fact that it is easy to copy does not mean it is legal.

If I add a widget with the titles and the teasers of your posts on my website - technically - I'm not copying anything.

This is what syndication is for. I choose what to syndicate, to add value to my website. And you gain exposure from appearing on many different websites. That's why most publish just a teaser of each post and not the full body.

Again, I'm not arguing about what is right (or fair) and what is wrong. I'm just saying that the protocol has been developed for this use.

Assuming that the teasers are of an approriate length and meet the standards for fair use, I see no problem with that.

I like to include full feeds because it greatly improves the experience of people consuming my content.

You're right, but what's your point?

I think we agree that stealing someone else's content and republishing it with your own ads is both legally and morally wrong. I don't see how publishing in RSS changes that.

Please, see my answer to the comment below.

Reuters could do nothing and come out ahead while the AP wastes money on this. They don't even have to make a statement. All they have to do is not follow the AP's footsteps.

Yeah, but the larger issue is that wire services are hurting as some newspapers fail and others cut back on expenses. Obviously they shouldn't do what AP is doing, but Reuters probably does have to make some changes to survive long term.

Do remember that Reuters is in the information dissemination business. They do have multiple sources of revenue, and don't have to rely on direct revenues from the news business.

http://thomsonreuters.com/about/

A good example is ThomsonReuters have some excellent trading platforms that are actually market leaders in their respective asset classes.

As an aside: Reuters pushed for an open syndication standard--NewsML--back in 2001 (http://about.reuters.com/newsml/). It's become a standard endorsed by the International Press Telecommunications Council.

Yep I did a lot of work on that - we rebuilt reuters.com from a normal corporate site into a news publishing system, ATG Dynamo on top of the TIBCO back end, running out of an otherwise empty datacentre in New Jersey. Chicken parm subs for lunch every day. Good times.

ATG's Droplets were way nicer than the EJBs that everyone else was using, but the writing was on the wall for them... JBoss is only just now catching up to what ATG had back then.

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