Honest question here: if you're pushing your content out via an RSS feed, does every RSS aggregator have to get permission to use it in their aggregation? How does that work with the thousands of other RSS aggregators?
I'd guess personal feed reader applications are relatively clearly covered, because when you offer a feed for your users to read it is implied that they are going to use an application of some kind to read it.
Websites that just publicly reproduce all contents of an RSS feed very likely aren't (and have lost the resulting law suits, at least here in Germany)
I feel that by enabling/creating an RSS feed for your content you are implicitly allowing people to use the content in the RSS feed as they see fit. You may put a license of some type on it, for various free use type licenses or whatever, but you get the point. If there isn't a license on the site or in the feed stating how the content can be used, people are going to assume they can aggregate it how they see fit.
I wrote quite a large news aggregator in the past it indexed over 200 sites every 5-10 minutes. Intially when we were doing the research for the RSS/Atom feeds, we were contacting producers of the content explaining what we were doing to see if they wanted in.
We were getting such overwhelmingly positive response from the creators that they were happy that people were actually using the RSS feeds and were interested spreading the content around that we never had anyone request to be removed or didnt ask specifically to get into the aggregator. In fact the only maintenance was when a site died or they changed their feed URL.
An RSS feed is not a push. It's exactly the same as any other web page: you must pull on it to get the new content.
Sure, from the point of view of a user of an aggregator, the aggregator went out and did the work automatically. Whether it is pull or push is not obvious. But the fact remains, it is all pull.
> An RSS feed is not a push. It's exactly the same as any other web page: you must pull on it to get the new content.
Fair enough, though I think the semantic distinction doesn't really address where I'm confused. My two main questions being 1) does every aggregator need a site's permission to use their RSS feed, and 2) why else would you publish an RSS feed if not to make your content accessible across other platforms / sources?
An RSS feed is a pull, sure, but it seems like one is pulling content that the creator has put a "pull here" sign on.
