RSS feeds

Curious about RSS feeds and what other people have used them for. Looking at sites like CNN etc., their terms seem to be you can't redistribute, publish and all the usual stuff - the feeds are supposed to be for personal use only I think.

Obviously though they're a big site that doesn't need publicity. Would it be a good idea to allow other sites to publish your RSS feed for free, with the proviso the headlines have to link back to your site? How hard would it be to enforce fair use and so on? Would I have to hire a lawyer to write up the terms, seeing as it wouldn't be as simple as "everything on this site is implicitly copyrighted"...

 

We use RSS feeds to send personalized project notifications, list projects for affiliates and more. We want people to publish and redistribute them as long as it's not SPAM or illegal etc. The only problem we had was some pharmacy site who used them just to get more content pages and links on their site. If interested in how we use them, look here:

http://www.getafreelancer.com/info/rssfeeds.html

 

Most of the TOS I've read for RSS feeds indicate that you can use them if you leave the channel info, which is their credits, as the first item on the page, complete.

Yahoo! News requires that you display the complete URL for each News Item listed after the channel info.

 

As noppid pointed out, most sites offering RSS feeds require you to leave the backlink/logo intact.

 

I'm running about 30 feeds, all are on demand by the user. Some are posted as posts to our forum daily by a bot I wrote. I have had no complaints.

I do believe that the worst that could happen is you would get a cease and desist order. They are not a big deal, they say don't use it anymore, you stop, everything goes away.

However since the point of RSS is to get news out, respecting the branding should allow you to get endless service from just about any news feed IMO.

 

Cool I was actually thinking about the implications of running my own RSS feeds rather than using someone else's. Sounds like it'll be a good idea, I'm going to give it serious consideration.

Thanks all!

 

I use CARP. It's stupid simple. If I can help holler. It's not alot of code. The code is php.

 

Done it, wrote it myself, including firefox livefeed link - took about 5 mins

I love XML...

Now I just have to write some terms and conditions :S