Are Google "Shared Items" (from Feeds) illegal?

Discussion in 'Legal Issues' started by OSWebMaster, Jan 3, 2008.

  1. #1
    Hello All -

    If you are able to republish RSS posts easily... are you stealing? Usually, if its a feed scraper, and you have no permision, AND you are doing so for commercial purposes, the answer would be yes. But, what if you received them in a Reader first, and the Reader enabled a way to share your favorite posts with your friends. Hmmm. Sounds innocent enough. That's what Google has just done.

    Google gives you a web page with your shared posts on them -- straight from a variety of feeds. Ok.

    Now what could be the copyright beef in this case? Well, suppose I start to publicize my "page" as a sort of online magazine -- heck, there's even an RSS feed for this shared feed page (talk about redundancy... or was that repurposing? Maybe it's just a new form of "regifting", straight from Google in time for the holidays).

    So is that proper use when it comes to copyright -- your posts reposted on a Google feed sharing page? And... what if someone takes the feed from my feed sharing page and uses it... on their feed sharing page? Oh... the madness.

    What say you?

    Scott Frangos, Managing Editor -- WebHelperMagazine.com
     
    OSWebMaster, Jan 3, 2008 IP