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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

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...?

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>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 The distinction between what is a "feed reader" and what is a "web site" is already outdated.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.

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