RSS4Lib

I jumped on the Facebook bandwagon as it was pulling out of town and created a Facebook page for RSS4Lib (become a fan!). In the process, as I was adding the RSS feed for this blog using the Notes tool, I noticed something more than a little annoying: RSS feeds added to a Facebook page using Facebook’s Notes application are rewritten to drive all traffic from that version of the feed to Facebook, not your own site. While clearly in Facebook’s financial interest to bring more traffic to Facebook, they do so without explicit permission.

When you set up an RSS feed into Facebook notes, you are asked to agree to a brief terms and conditions that says, in its entirety, “By entering a URL, you represent that you have the right to permit us to reproduce this content on the Facebook site and that the content is not obscene or illegal.”

However, Facebook’s concept of “reproduce on the Facebook site” and mine are somewhat different. While I fully understood that my blog posts would be presented inside Facebook — as they are on the RSS4Lib Notes page, I am surprised that the associated RSS feed includes rewritten channel and item data. As an example, take a look at the feed’s channel data:

<channel>
<title>RSS4Lib: Innovative Ways Libraries Use RSS's Facebook Notes</title>
<link>http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=81126379633</link>
<description>RSS4Lib: Innovative Ways Libraries Use RSS's Facebook Notes</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<category domain="Facebook">NotesFeed</category>
<generator>Facebook Syndication</generator><docs>http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification</docs>
<managingEditor>http://www.facebook.com/pages/RSS4Lib-Innovative-Ways-Libraries-Use-RSS/81126379633</managingEditor>
<webMaster>webmaster@facebook.com</webMaster>
...
</channel>

The feed’s link goes to Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=81126379633). That page provides reproductions of recent posts. Clicking on a post title, within Facebook, brings up that page in another Facebook page. There is a tiny link at the bottom of the page to “View original post”.

The individual items in the RSS feed are likewise rewritten:

<item>
<guid>http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/05/feedmil_finds_feeds.html</guid>
<title>Feedmil Finds Feeds</title>
<link>http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=82829822943</link>
<description>Full Text of Post Goes Here</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2009 16:39:36 +0000</pubDate>
<author>RSS4Lib: Innovative Ways Libraries Use RSS</author>
<dc:creator>RSS4Lib: Innovative Ways Libraries Use RSS</dc:creator>
<source url="http://www.rss4lib.com/index.xml">http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/05/feedmil_finds_feeds.html</source>
</item>

They rewrite the link. They change the author from what it is in the original post, “rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum)”, assign a creator that is not the author cited in the original post, and link to an RSS feed as the source. (Facebook does display the URL of the post, but clicking it goes to the feed. Depending on your web browser, it may not be helpful behavior to get an XML file.) They don’t provide attribution for individual posts on the site.

The way Facebook is using my content does not fit my understanding of the Creative Commons “Attribution Non Commercial License” I have applied. Among other things, it states that:

1. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)
2. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

I’m willing to give on point 2 — yes, I understand that by reproducing my blog on Facebook’s site that I’m contributing to their commercial gain — but on point 1, I did not waive my right to appropriate attribution as specified in the license on the blog by agreeing to “reproduce” the blog on their site. If this is “remixing,” allowed in the Attribution Non Commercial license, requires that the licensee “takes reasonable steps to clearly label, demarcate or otherwise identify that changes were made to the original Work.” This has not been done.

This sort of misuse of content happens all the time, of course, but rarely so blatantly.

See Also

• RSS Feeds & Copyright (May 2008)
• Creative Commons and Bloggers (August 2008)
• Copyright, RSS, and Common Sense (September 2007)

Say you’re blogging about a topic and you want to quote an excerpt of a commercial publication in your post. How much can you quote, verbatim, under the doctrine of “fair use“?
This is the subject of an article in Sunday’s New York Times: “Copyright Challenge for Sites That Excerpt.” Here’s how the Times article sums up the problem:

The legal disputes are emblematic of a larger question that has emerged from the Internet’s link economy. The editors of many Web sites, including ones operated by the Times Company, post excerpts from competitors’ content from time to time. At what point does excerpting from an article become illegal copying?

Courts have not provided much of an answer. In the United States, the copyright law provides a four-point definition of fair use, which takes into consideration the purpose (commercial vs. educational) and the substantiality of the excerpt.

[Yes, I’m aware of the irony of quoting an 88-word passage from an article about the dangers of quoting lengthy passages from commercial publications in a blog post.]

The concept of Fair Use is a tricky, and slippery one. The courts usually determine what is “fair” after the fact, when someone complains. A short excerpt that doesn’t reproduce the heart of the original almost certainly is fair use; a significant excerpt that reproduced the main point of the article probably is not. Reproducing the entire original clearly fails the text.

The culture of the blogosphere has been to define fair use quite broadly; the courts have rarely, if ever, had a voice in the matter. Yet. I suspect that, as the economic woes facing the corporate world drag on, commercial sites will increasingly perceive extensive quoting of their content on other sites as an economic problem. Whether such extensive quoting of published content has a real or imagined effect on revenue — and whether that effect is positive or negative — remains to be seen.

Related Posts

• AP, Bloggers, and Fair Use (June 2008)
• RSS Feeds & Copyright (May 2008)

The Research Blogging web site is a nexus for peer-reviewed literature and serious academic blogging about it. (No, that’s not a contradiction in terms.) Research Blogging helps readers find critical analysis of scientific reporting by pulling these scholarly blog posts together. Many of these blog posts in reaction to published articles are written by experts in the field and can help you put the article in context. From the Research Blogging site:

While the majority of posts indexed by Research Blogging are in the hard sciences, there are a reasonable number in the area of information and library science, broadly construed.
To join the commentary, you must register. Once you’ve done that, you get a code snippet to include in your posts that are about peer-reviewed articles. Research Blogging then adds your post to its index. Being a scholarly effort, there is peer review of posts indexed by the site — if other registered research bloggers feel your post does not follow the site’s guidelines, it is removed from the index. This keeps the content relevant to the site’s mission.