Is it legal?

Is it legal to take an RSS feed off a blog and then use the feed on your blog as an automated feed? I have little experience with
RSS.

 

As soon as you don't modify the content (and keep the links), it is legal.

 

Ok thats really great cheers. Also is there any website which provides an index of free feeds?

EDIT: also do search engines pick up RSS feeds as content?

 

There are plenty of sites that snatch Feeds to post on their sites but whether it is legal or not I don’t know. There are many issues that have to be taken into consideration first, Google news only displays headings and a short part of the news and they are getting sued for it so I guess there must be some legal issues here.

 

It shouldn't be a problem (means: if you want definite advice you have to ask a lawyer) to just repost the headlines, but make sure you state somewhere that the content is not coming from you but from xyz.
If you want to repost the entire posts you should definitely ask them. The fact that there are RSS feeds doesn't imply that you can do with it whatever you want.

 

As long as you give credit where it is due. Sure.

 

That is BS. Or did you just want to increase your post count?
Otherwise let's steal a car and put a sign up that says "this car belongs to xyz". When the police comes after you you just say "BUT I GAVE CREDIT!". Geez.

 

lol ok I get the point.

 

I am currious about this my self , I know there are many webmasters against using rss feeds for content on others blogs but most programs that make rss feeds offer the option to post part of the post in the feeds or the whole post if they don't want someone stealing there post it would seem easy enough to just click the option to only post partial and not full feeds this way they don't have the problem that some one is reposting there full content on other sites.

sorry I am a little tired so sorry if I am making no sence.

But my question is , is there actually any laws against pulling feeds from sites any site owner can have only partial feeds shown or decide on not having a feed at all and if they have feeds it in my opinion is for use by others as long as all links are left up from the original post and content is not tampered with.

I realize that many have an opinion on this subject but opinions are not legal. is there a lawyer in the house or someone know of a site that has the laws if any on use of rss feeds

 

Yeah, an answer to this would be great.

 

While I don't know any specific laws regarding RSS feeds in particular, normal copyright laws will most likely apply. If you are using the feed without permission to boost the content of your site, then it would be the same as actually going round copying articles from other sites and posting them on your site.

Site Feeds and Copyrights

When considering integrating a site feed (RSS or otherwise) from another site into your own site you need to consider the copyright issues which may apply. The content of the feed is still considered copyrighted material, especially in the case where the feed contains the whole article/post.

The primary purpose of a site feed is for the visitors of that site to be kept up to date on new additions to the site. In some cases the site owner will allow the feed to contain the whole article, instead of just a short introductory paragraph. In this way the site visitors can read the whole thing using their feed reader (instead of visiting the site).

The secondary use of a site feed is syndication e.g. other sites can integrate the feed and that site's visitors will see a list of the newest articles added to the original site. These feeds normally contain a short paragraph showing what the story is about and then links to the original site.

It has become popular for sites to integrate feeds from various other sites in order to boost their content and pages they can put Adsense advertising on. Many MFA sites use this technique to create pages containing only feeds and then generate income from the advertisements served on those pages. Using the feed in this way can be seen as a copyright infringement especially since you are profiting from the copyrighted work.

You need to check with the particular site whether it is ok to make use of their feeds in this way. The main purpose of RSS feeds are to keep that site's visitors up to date with any updates to the site. Some people will definitely frown on having their feeds used to boost content for ads to be shown.

Here's what I found out when I compiled the Copyright - What you need to know thread.