I am using WP robot and other robots to aggregate RSS feeds to my site. It is pulling articles off other sites and news sites. Often I have full news articles posted. The articles have links and credit the authors as well as the news site. Is this legal? what are the repercussions if any? and if so how should I proceed? I believe my news aggregation is important and the purpose is to have all current news articles in one place. Appreciate any genuine advice/ experience
Unless the terms of the site state otherwise, it is illegal. RSS feeds are not for sites to post content on another website, they are for their visitors to use. Giving credit or a link does NOT grant you permission unless that is the terms of the RSS feed. MOST RSS feeds do not allow any commercial use - i.e. if your site has advertising, charges for membership, takes donations, etc. While copyright infringement can be a criminal charge, it is rare. You could be sued, but would likely be looking at a DMCA filing which can result is loss of adsense account, removal/de-indexing of site from search engines, termination of your hosting account (if it is in the US).