Do Bloggers Need To Create A Standard RSS Copyright?
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There’s been some discussion recently on several popular blogs about the use and possible misuse of RSS feeds by services that are repurposing blogger’s content from their RSS feeds into new site pages of their own.
To be clear, on most of these applications the issue isn’t with the content being plagiarized or due credit not being given for the original source. Those are different problems all-together but not nearly as prevalent.
The issues with the services being discussed (and I’m not naming any specific services or bloggers here intentionally) are numerous, but I’m going to focus on the two points that concern me most:
Who owns the conversation?
“Owns” is a poor word choice here, because I think the question really should be who is entitled to benefit from the conversation.
I’m not even going to touch on who deserves any advertising revenue from page views of the content, the original writer or the service which simply scrapes and republishes their work.
Instead, I’m going to focus on the value of the content information and any follow-up conversation that results from it.
When the conversation begins to take place on a site other than the original writer’s both the writer and any readers interested in the topic risk losing value.
Here’s an example, let’s say that some site republishes one of my posts on their pages. I may not even know they’ve done this, so then if some reader comes along and offers comments of additional value to my writing there’s a good chance I’ll never even see them.
Or worse, if some reader finds my writing on an external service–and not knowing that I’m not affiliated with that service in any way–the reader has questions about the topic so asks them in the comments of the republished page. Days, then weeks go by with the reader checking back to see my replies to his comments, only to become frustrated and annoyed because it seems I’m ignoring him.
Not only does that devalue the conversation for the reader, but it damages my reputation as the writer as well.
Basically, the only party gaining benefit from moving the conversation in this case seems to be the service which republished the content. That hardly seems fair to bloggers or readers.
Duplicate Content Filters/Penalties
Search Engines work hard to provide the best results possible to their users. Part of this is avoiding giving out the same information over and over in search results. For example, if someone searches for “red widgets” they don’t want the same article being displayed in all 10 of the first page of search results because that only gives the user a single choice rather than 10 to turn to.
Search Engines try to avoid this by only indexing a single source of any piece of information. When a blogger’s RSS feed is republished there’s a risk that the writer’s content will be indexed by search engines for the republished pages on an external service rather than from the blogger’s own site.
Again, this hardly seems fair to either the writer or readers as it can lead to scenarios like I described above where the conversation gets broken.
I’ve been involved in heated discussions over duplicate content before, how exactly filters/penalties get applied and so on…but ultimately my thoughts on it come from my experiences with it.
Not too long ago my company released a new software title that we were very excited about. We spent weeks of time and loads of money establishing the software and web site online. Then somebody came along and pasted our web site copy–almost verbatim–on a popular Wiki site but didn’t even include resource links to our web site, but rather linked out to unconnected software collections. Within 48 hours we no longer ranked in the top 10 for our own software title or web site on Google.
It took a lot of work and money to recover from that, in large part because the moderators of the Wiki were uncooperative (I still believe it was a self-serving moderator who created the page and linked out to his/her own affiliate software collection sites), but the experience was a lesson learned on how duplicate content filters/penalties can harm the original content creators, as well as how dangerous it can be to have your content republished on a site that is seen by search engines as having more authority than your own.
So, what’s the answer for bloggers?
I really don’t know. I’ve heard different ideas proposed, but all of them have pros and cons.
Bloggers can reduce their risk by only publishing partial content RSS feeds. I don’t like this idea myself. Sure it would be helpful, but it seems more like treating the symptoms rather than addressing the disease to me; and it can cause strain to the followers of your blog who enjoy reading your content in their favorite feed readers.
Proponents of this method say that if readers are reading the content in a reader program they aren’t visiting your blog anyway, so how is that any better than them reading it on a republishing service?
That really feels like a false argument though. I read a lot of blog feeds through Bloglines every day, but if I have something to add or ask on the topic I have to click through to the original blog posting page to post it. Feed readers don’t move the conversation away from where it belongs, they only allow followers to save time with the blogs and discussions they won’t be participating directly in.
Another idea that I’ve seen talked about is bloggers making sure to display copyright claims on their RSS feeds, and being willing to enforce their rights with services that republish the feed content.
I think something along these lines might work to address the problems, but it would need a lot of discussion and ratification to work properly.
Simply putting a copyright notice on your feed, if you think about it, is too restrictive. Technically, in doing that you could be preventing honest aggregating services and feed reading applications from displaying your feed content to readers in the way you want them to.
Personally, instead of extensive–and likely hard to decode for most folks–copyright notices, I think a fairly simple acceptable use policy for your RSS feed content that is clearly defined within the feed itself might be a better option.
For example, if your primary concern is in the moving of the conversation would it be enough to include in your AUP a stipulation that the content may not be displayed on any page which contains a form for user input?
This would still allow services to republish your content which should contain links to the original post on your blog for readers to follow for discussion, but would prevent services (which operate honestly) from moving or breaking the conversation.
Concerned about duplicate content? This is a little tougher simply because search engines are really dumb about deciphering original sources, but I think it’s something that could be overcome with the help of the search engines and since the goal here is to define original from duplicate content which would ultimately benefit the search engines themselves it seems like something they should be on board with.
If there were a recognized tag to label a republished piece of content with, for example something as simple as adding “{REPUBLISHED}” to the front or end of the content title so that search engines–and readers–would know this wasn’t an original source, coupled with a stipulation in your RSS feed AUP that the {REPUBLISHED} tag be included would eliminate this issue completely across honest services.
What do you think about it? I’d really like to get ideas from you on how bloggers can protect themselves, their content and their readers.
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2 Responses to “Do Bloggers Need To Create A Standard RSS Copyright?”
By Jonathan Bailey on Apr 17, 2008 | Reply
As I see the issue, what we need is a new set of specifications for RSS feeds that let owners designate how they want the feed used.
Something similar to what we have with HTML and Meta tags would work relatively well so long as the result was machine-readable and easily followed.
We haven’t run into these issues much with search engines in dealing with regular HTML pages due to these specifications, bringing something like them to RSS could really help separate the good guys from the bad ones…
By Scott on Apr 19, 2008 | Reply
Jonathan, I completely agree with you, my only concern is that embedding tags into an RSS feed isn’t in itself going to prevent any duplicate content issues with search engines once the feed gets republished elsewhere.
That’s where I see an AUP element being added, coupled with an accepted specific tag that designates republished content and the acknowledgment by search engines to not index (as original) content pages displaying that republished tag or notification as a possible answer.