Ripping Off RSS Feeds: RSS Syndication-Display Services Dozen-a-Dime

Once "every" entrepreneurial internet marketer out there starts producing "marketing" software based on a specific technology you know that technology is nearing mainstream use. It has to be something about their born-in money making nose ...

Anyway, new tools that allow webmasters to display syndicated content on their sites are poping up like mushrooms after the rain, all claiming they are the solution to the problem of not having enough time to produce content to keep bringing visitors back and satsify the search engines.

While publishing syndicated content certainly has merit, it's still not the solution to all of your online publishing problems as some would have you believe.

One of the latest such solutions is the SuperFeedSystem, which was released just a couple of days ago.

You can find our more about the tool by reading their press release, but there is something we need to point out:

"In our example, let's say that we wanted to find a Data Stream that has news about sports. After about 25 seconds of searching, you find a very nice Feed that contains the latest sporting news from a very well-respected source. What's in that feed? News from last night's game, the latest player drafts and trades, TV and radio schedules for games?practically everything that a sports fan might be interested in.

Are you allowed to get that feed? Yes! In fact, RSS is designed to make the distribution of any form of content easy. The reason that an author, news organization or corporation's content is syndicated is because they want other people to subscribe and post that syndication. If they didn't want it out on the web, they wouldn't syndicate it! So we use it."

Unfortunatelly, this is not exactly true. You in fact may not use syndicated feeds in any way you like, unless the publisher gives you that permission in his terms of use.

There have been quite some discussions about this topic during the past few months, with many publishers resenting webmasters placing ads next to their syndicated content and using their content to make money.

What can you do?

You should be fine if you post only summaries and links back to full-text articles on the publisher's site, and of course give full attribution. If you're going to place ads next to that content, that might be more tricky. So it's always good to take a look at the publishers terms of use.

And if you don't find any information pertaining to this, why not just ask? Most will be fine with you publishing their syndicated content, as long as you follow some ground rules ...

Also, if you're on the other side of the rainbow and wish to protect your feeds, here's an article with some information to help you out.

Richard MacManus at IonRSS has some posts about these problems as well:

RSS Infomercials are upon us
A rant against infomercial-type mini-sites offering RSS services. Interestingly enough, it mentions the SuperFeedSystem.

What to do when your RSS feed is ripped off
Richard touches the copyrights issue and discusses Jason Calacanis' open letter about their blogs being ripped-off.

More RSS feed rip-off merchants
Richard finds more services that might infringe on publishers' copyrights.