RSS Ethics

Posted in How to Blog, Law by Elliott Back on March 24th, 2005.

Scoble strongheadedly defends his full-text linkblog as the intended use of RSS syndication formats:

By publishing RSS as full text you’re buying into a system where your words will be republished in a variety of ways.

RSS is simply an XML format for encoding data. Just like HTML, Word Doc, PDF, .java, or any other format, people are able to do many things, but legally constrained from doing some of them. That includes republishing my content, to which I have excusive rights under US copyright law. Scoble, you could get sued for your “link blog.”

Let’s take a look at an example, to the absurd. MP3 is an audio format for online transmitting and publishing of music. Say, for example, that I write a song, encode it as an MP3 file, and then post that file online. Does anyone have the right to republish or redistribute my song? No! Not without my permission. By anology, RSS is another format for online transmission and publication of text data.

Rights to RSS context belong exclusively to their owner.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2005 at 3:19 am and is tagged with doc pdf, mp3 file, xml format, scoble, word doc, copyright law, many things, ethics, syndication, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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Michael 3 years ago 1 point
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Elliot

Long time reader of your blog. Simply a lurker that can add nothing to your stuff. I admire a lot of what you do.

I've been trying to find out if it is possible to access search string caches on sites such as google. Simply as a tool to be able to query popular searches or even if specific searches have been done. First, is the possible? Second, is it ethical if the information is only used for personal gratification? Third, do you know how to do it? Fourth, would you share it with me?

Take Care
Michael

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elliottback 3 years ago 1 point
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It's generally impossible--search engines have to willfully release that data, and Google, for one, doesn't. If you have a Google AdWords account you can see traffic estimates for certain keywords, though. Overture is a bit better--it gives you a tool to tell you the number of searches done for a particular term 6 months ago:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory...

See this page for more:

http://www.storebuilder.co.uk/article154.html

As to the question of ethics, I see no problem with finding out whether people are searching for specific terms, even to the point where you know (like Google does) which people are searching for what terms!

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