Tuesday, October 28, 2008

RSS Terms of Use - Really?

I was perusing as usual in Google Reader and came across this interesting little tidbit -

Google Reader (1000+)
Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!


The Terms of Use are fairly tame, and seem mostly concerned with traffic - please don't "host" our article on your site and pretend it's your news. I can imagine that this is a concern but hardly think that this is the way to go about it. There also seem to be implications for feed aggregators or shared feed sites like social|median...many such services have pages with some (though not all) of the content, and a place for comments by users of the service. I only glanced at the terms of use, but that seems to inch pretty close to their concept of "misuse" at first glance.

This is where attribution licenses are extremely worthwhile. Although I can understand an ad-driven blog-o-palooza being concerned about impressions, this seems a ham-handed way to go about it. I'll update when I have more time to look at the Terms with my lawyerin' goggles on.

In the meantime, your thoughts?

No comments: