Republishing RSS Feeds

The latest buzz on forums and such is the ability to republish RSS feeds on your own website. This is being recommended as a means to provide additional content to your website. Sounds like a great idea, but what are the legal issues involved?

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. Syndication of a feed would seem to mean the ability to republish that feed on another website. Isn’t that what syndication is after all? For the most part, people “syndicate” feeds within their own personal RSS Readers. So by and large people syndicate for personal use. However, republishing on a website is a totally different story. Oddly enough, feed providers (both small (most blogs) and very large (Yahoo News)) have very vague Terms of Service when it comes to the use of a feed. Often, the terms are contradictory. I have emailed several large feed providers to have them clarify their terms.

On my own site, I have republished feeds from other sites. I have written to all of them for permission. This is at the least, one means of protecting oneself. If in doubt, ask. I have found a couple examples of explicit statements regarding the republishing of feeds.

Sitepoint has a very simple (yet very clear!) statement about the use of their feeds.

No problem. In the spirit of content syndication our RSS feeds can also be used for server-side scripts on your site to read and display lists of recent content from SitePoint.com.

Great. Wonderful. Very clear. They understand the need to communicate on this issue.

Another good example from a blog is Ask Leo. His terms state:

You may republish the contents of the RSS/Syndication Feed(s) made available on this web site, provided that you retain all URL links within the feed as part of that republication.

Again, very simple. Very clear.

A excellent example can be found at Rehab Designs. This is the best example of terms I have found. Very thorough. A far more complete statement about their terms then provided by the examples above. Their terms are far clearer then even Yahoo News. They even explictly call their statement “RSS & XML Data Feed Licensing Agreement.” It is ironic to me that this example comes from a company outside of the IT industry. They clearly understand the need for such a statement.

This Agreement describes the conditions under which you are permitted to display the free data feeds provided by RehabDesigns.com (the “Feeds”) on your own web site (for the Terms of Use for the RehabDesigns.com site itself, see Legal).

Excellent. They come right out and address the issue.

Does everyone need a statement that is so comprehensive? No. For the average Joe, a statement such as Sitepoint’s will do.

What about Creative Commons? Yes a Creative Commons license would generally cover the area being discussed. However, it doesn’t specifically address the issue of feed republication. It is merely assumed. Frankly, assuming is dangerous.

The only place that I have found that is actively discussing this issue is Robin Good’s website Master New Media. He has an ongoing discussion about this and you can enter the discussion with this article.

All this is said for one reason: the need for clarity on this issue. I HATE reading legalese. I prefer simple, clear, concise statements.