More on RSS and Copyright Issues: Still No Solution

Copyright and RSS have always been a big issue, since RSS makes it so easy to take content from content producers, display it in full on your website and use it to generate more traffic, search engine juice and especially make money by placing ads next to that content.

It's certainly inviting for marketers to take advantage of this RSS capability and it's also understanding from publishers to want to protect their content in some way. The problem is that there is still no clear consensus on what's wrong and what not.

John Palfrey at the Berkman Center at Harward Law School continues the discussion and comes quite close to the solution I've been proposing some time ago. Basically, the solution is to re-syndicate only the headlines with a short digest, giving full credit to the source, making both the publisher and the marketer happy. [there's more to it, but just read John's post for that]

This in fact does seem right, as it protects both the publisher and at the same time represents the natural use of the RSS channel, also making it possible for marketers to create RSS Radars that filter content from multiple RSS sources based on precise keyword combinations.

Having said this, I am fully against re-publishing full-text of RSS feeds, as that comes very close to "stealing" from publishers.

But I also have to wonder what this line of thought means for services like Gmail, which base their model on placing ads around full-text content generated by third parties?