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It doesn't work that way. You don't get to set terms of use for an RSS feed. It is either an RSS feed or it is not.

Just because websites type legalese on their site proclaiming they magically control their RSS feed does not make it so. The only way to control your RSS feed is not to have one.

You obviously do not know copyright laws so stop pretending.

NY times

3. RESTRICTIONS. Except as expressly set forth in Section 1 and/or unless otherwise consented to by NYTIMES.COM, you may not, directly or indirectly: (a) sell, modify, translate, copy, publish, transmit, distribute or otherwise disseminate the Service or any portion thereof; or delete or fail to display any promotional taglines included in the Service; (b) rent, lease, or otherwise transfer rights to the Service; (c) display the name, logo, trademark or other identifier of another person (except for NYTIMES.COM or you) on your Site in such a manner as to give the viewer the impression that such other person is a publisher or distributor of the Service on the Site;
 
It doesn't work that way. You don't get to set terms of use for an RSS feed. It is either an RSS feed or it is not.

Just because websites type legalese on their site proclaiming they magically control their RSS feed does not make it so. The only way to control your RSS feed is not to have one.

Exactly. As you put it, you can't just have legalese on your site somewhere and proclaim it so. I might read it, I might not read it, I might read it and just proclaim to myself in my own domain "No, I won't do that." Unless they enforce an agreement of the terms before allowing access to the RSS feed, its just a bunch of legalese hot air that won't mean anything. But, the same can be said about this email Apple is sending out -- especially how they will seek compensation for law suits if the content they aggregate from your RSS causes them to be sued. Thats funny.
 
Both sets of terms of service allow for Apple to do this. Forbes: "GRANT. Subject to the terms of this Agreement and, unless otherwise consented to by FORBES.COM, FORBES.COM hereby grants you, during the Term, a revocable, nontransferable, nonsublicensable, nonexclusive license to display on your Web site ("Site") the headlines, active links, or other source identifiers, and other information or materials, including any promotional taglines that you specifically select to receive from FORBES.COM (collectively, the "Content") through the Service provided that you do not alter, edit, or delete any of the Service. " WP: "We encourage new and innovative uses of our content, and we want our readers to have access to our content in a wide variety of different ways. We therefore make our content available through RSS feeds for personal use (e.g., in a news reader), for many commercial purposes, or for any other form of distribution to a third party." It's the whole point of RSS.

I never said they can't allow it to be reproduced, of course they can. Apple's opt out emails would not fly though.
 
It's fairly simple. When you post something on your website, you have copyright over that text. Within certain limitations, others can copy that content (e.g. citation), but generally they need the copyright holder's permission to reproduce the content, especially on their own website or service. Just because you can access the text via an RSS feed, does not mean that you are allowed to do this. They may offer the RSS feed for personal use only to their subscribers (some RSS feeds even have ads within them or are shortened with a link to the webpage). Apple is doing this for commercial reasons and that requires permission.

Thank you, finally someone who is not completely Apple-brainwashed! Even though the technology behind RSS makes it possible to redistribute feeds that says nothing about the content! Content publishers own their content, period. You are in now way allowed to redistribute that, ever heard about that thing called copyright? The possibility for you, as an induhvidual to subscribe to a RSS feed, does in no way give a multinational corporation right to republish that content without permission.

Let's see... Apple publishes their news as an RSS feed. What do you guys think happens if I republish that feed on my site, with ads "next to" their content? Of course I'll send Apple an email notifying them that I will do so, and that they can opt-out if they don't want me to.
I bet I'm in for a world of hurt in the courts...
 
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I see/have no problem with Apple's news app simply coming with a collection of "default" RSS feeds, since they are publicly available and that's what they're for. But there's no way that the news companies can/should be bound by any terms that Apple throws at one of the company's email addresses.
 
It doesn't work that way. You don't get to set terms of use for an RSS feed. It is either an RSS feed or it is not.

Just because websites type legalese on their site proclaiming they magically control their RSS feed does not make it so. The only way to control your RSS feed is not to have one.

Copyright law still apply.

"
Therefore, RSS feeds are difficult to regulate. As a general rule, reusing someone else‚s content is prohibited, because copyright lawsattach to feeds. As a writer, when I compose words that will eventually be published on the internet, someone owns the right to those words. In most cases, it is the publisher since I get paid to contribute content. For personal websites or blogs, the author owns the rights. Unless you specifically give license to another site for your content, it cannot be replicated.

Does that mean that when you put the entire content of an article in an RSS feed that it cannot be republished? Technically, yes. Sending out text through a feed does not renounce your rights to the article. That doesn‚t mean that someone won‚t redistribute it for their own profit."

http://webdesign.about.com/od/rss/a/rss-and-copyright.htm
 
That doesn't matter. Apple can't just send an email that says "you agree to this", as they are doing.

Sure they can. Apple didn't even have to send out an email because the RSS feeds are public. They did so out of courtesy. Maybe it could have been handled better but this is a non-issue. If publishers embed ads into their feeds (I do on one of my websites) then they will get ad revenue hits from Apple's inclusion of their feed, which could be a huge revenue stream. Apple could show other ads to the side but a lot of sites/companies do that already. I used a free RSS app that adds its own ads at the bottom of content. It's no big deal.
 
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There is a big detail that is being missed here.

A blogger or news site may have limited license to the content they are quoting or using. For example, their contract may state that they may publish said content only directly from their servers and may not sub license or permit others to redistribute said content.

Aside from that, they have a legal right to only permit distribution of said content in manners which they explicitly have permitted. Use of content until someone opts out is not explicit permission.

And, for those who say RSS is public, so is most of the information on the Internet.

Consider Apple's refusal to permit particular websites or venues to play their freely available and publicly distributed videos from their website....

Or, let's go a step further, let's take a PC World or Mac World magazine article (from website) and republish the somewhere else without explicit consent and say we have every right to do so because they failed to opt out. You better have a few million dollars in your pocket to bail yourself out of the lawsuit.

They shouldn't be putting content in their RSS feed they don't have the right to distribute. This is one of the reasons apple puts the legal onus back on publishers, because clearly publishers are dumb.
 
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Sure they can. Apple didn't even have to send out an email because the RSS feeds are public. They did so out of courtesy. Maybe it could have been handled better but this is a non-issue. If publishers embed ads into their feeds (I do on one of my websites) then they will get ad revenue hits from Apple's inclusion of their feed, which could be a huge revenue stream. Apple could show other ads to the side but a lot of sites/companies do that already. I used a free RSS app that adds its own ads at the bottom of content. It's no big deal.

Wrong.

The Copyright Debate & RSS
RSS is commonly defined as really simple syndication. So, this means that any material contained in a feed is available for syndication, right? Well no, not exactly. It means that the content contained in an RSS feed is in a format that is syndication friendly, if the copyright holder allows for syndication. Offering a feed for syndication does not in fact grant any legal rights to anyone to reuse the feeds content beyond what the Copyright laws grant as Fair Use.

http://www.feedforall.com/rss-copyright-debate.htm

What Is Fair Use?


In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner. In other words, fair use is a defense against a claim of copyright infringement. If your use qualifies as a fair use, then it would not be considered an illegal infringement.
 
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If it's a public RSS feed, then is there really a problem with what's Apple's doing? They're just using content that's publicly available content and providing it to Apple users. They're not charging for it, nor are they redistributing content that's supposed to be behind a paywall.

To me it seems the email was just to let the publishers know that Apple is using the content that's already being provided and allowing the providers to opt-out if they wish. As long as Apple isn't claiming that they created the content (and giving credit to the creators) then I don't see what the problem is.

It's only news because it's Apple. Other news aggregators like flipboard don't even bother contacting the source, they just do it.
 
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Well, Apple doesn't intend to just link to it, but display the content and their own ads next to it. Essentially, they are planning to earn money using other people's content. And it is, after all, still copyrighted content. I think Apple is clearly out of line in assuming that publishers would agree to that by default.

That's a fair point but it happens all over the web. Publishers can simply include inline ads in their feeds (most do already) so they don't lose money. Apple might earn some money by bringing readers to the publishers (we don't know if they will for sure) but this has the potential to bring a lot of readers and money to publishers. Yes, it could have been handled better but it's pretty standard practice regarding RSS feeds. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just pointing out that this is how RSS feeds are handled.
 
Both sets of terms of service allow for Apple to do this. Forbes: "GRANT. Subject to the terms of this Agreement and, unless otherwise consented to by FORBES.COM, FORBES.COM hereby grants you, during the Term, a revocable, nontransferable, nonsublicensable, nonexclusive license to display on your Web site ("Site") the headlines, active links, or other source identifiers, and other information or materials, including any promotional taglines that you specifically select to receive from FORBES.COM (collectively, the "Content") through the Service provided that you do not alter, edit, or delete any of the Service. " WP: "We encourage new and innovative uses of our content, and we want our readers to have access to our content in a wide variety of different ways. We therefore make our content available through RSS feeds for personal use (e.g., in a news reader), for many commercial purposes, or for any other form of distribution to a third party." It's the whole point of RSS.

Meaningless.
 
Understandable someone would have their nose out of joint over this, Apple should have done this much differently.

On another note, I hope that the News app does filter out all of the BS advertising that most news/blog websites have.
 
Huh?

https://developer.apple.com/library...ion/General/Conceptual/News_Publishing_Guide/
Monetization of Apple News Format content is made simple with iAd, Apple’s advertising platform. Keep 100% of the revenue from the ads you sell, and 70% when iAd sells ads for you.

You do realise you would need to join apples iAd advertising platform. Think it through what is happening here.

So instead of people being taken to the site, and money being generated in form of ads on those sites, apple will not send the traffic through, have thier ads via they iAds platform and invite you to move thier business to them. If Google did this there would also be an outcry.

Can I just make it clear, Apple is offering to take 30% of ad revenue for using your content. Medium to small publishers will not do the sale of ads I house to benefit from the 100%
 
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If it's a public RSS feed, then is there really a problem with what's Apple's doing? They're just using content that's publicly available content and providing it to Apple users. They're not charging for it, nor are they redistributing content that's supposed to be behind a paywall.

To me it seems the email was just to let the publishers know that Apple is using the content that's already being provided and allowing the providers to opt-out if they wish. As long as Apple isn't claiming that they created the content (and giving credit to the creators) then I don't see what the problem is.

...RSS feeds are public. What's next, website owners being upset that Safari can access their websites unless they opt out?
 
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Nice try what? Using the feeds that are open to the public anyway?
Of course they are. RSS feeds are implemented to drive traffic to your site. Did you think they were there to make sure people did not come to your site , thus removing traffic on the poor severs and making sure you made no ads revenue ?

Also what might be shocking, Social media like Facebook and tweeter, while providing free content, want to drive the users to their websites ;)
 
Wrong.

The Copyright Debate & RSS
RSS is commonly defined as really simple syndication. So, this means that any material contained in a feed is available for syndication, right? Well no, not exactly. It means that the content contained in an RSS feed is in a format that is syndication friendly, if the copyright holder allows for syndication. Offering a feed for syndication does not in fact grant any legal rights to anyone to reuse the feeds content beyond what the Copyright laws grant as Fair Use.

http://www.feedforall.com/rss-copyright-debate.htm

I'm not ignoring the copyright issues and I'm not necessarily wrong - you're also not necessarily wrong. It's not a simple issue and there are not clear legal rulings (in the U.S.) regarding the manner (there is a ruling in Israel that would seem to support Apple's actions [in Israel]: http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Posting-RSS-feed-items-not-copyright-infringement).

Here's an example from about 4 years ago but about a paid RSS reader (which News isn't exactly [if you have an iOS device]): http://www.dmlp.org/blog/2010/new-y...g-all-paid-rss-readers-infringe-its-copyright

It's a gray area of copyright law with legal experts arguing for both sides. Right now, the bulk of opinion (expert) is in Apple's favor, like it or not.
 
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I'm confused as well -- if I were a publisher I'd be totally cool with this. You mean my content that I write is going to be seen by MILLIONS of people without any work on my part? Sounds awesome to me.

And as a publisher. How do I make money out of this to continue making more content and paying wages?
 
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