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As the author states, though, having an RSS feed is arguably an implicit license for what's in it. There are arguments against that too, I suppose, but they hav
by wwweston 11y ago
As the author states, though, having an RSS feed is arguably an implicit license for what's in it. There are arguments against that too, I suppose, but they have a lot in common with the idea that accessing a hyperlink without permission is a violation.
Apple's on good neighbor ground (and probably good legal ground) acting as an RSS aggregator while giving people a chance to opt out.
They're on neighbor-from-hell ground in handing third parties some weird auto-invoking license for using that party's content. This is the kind of behavior I expect from teenage fan posting a song from a band they like on YouTube, except the teenager is likely to recognize they don't hold any rights and aren't in any position to dictate a license before posting it.
- bliti 11y agoWhat's the standard license or understanding regarding RSS feeds? If the site has no terms and conditions, is it assumed allowed? If so, wouldn't that go against the practice of explicit permissions used in API?
- thephyber 11y agoIANAL RSS 2.0 is Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons licensed[1] Content on websites is subject to copyright law. There could be mitigating Fair Use conditions to those copyright claims such as truncated news usage, educational use, criticism, parody, etc. Web server HTTP requests generally bind the requester to the legal agreements on the site {Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, etc}, at least in terms of denial of service (so potentially less extreme). Any violation of the "/robots.txt" by RSS readers could be considered a breach of Terms of Service (depending on the existence and content of those two documents). I have not seen the News App and I don't know how it works, but taking copyrighted work without requesting (requesting is opt-in, not opt-out) and monetizing them with ads seems pretty risky to me. It's possible the article author somehow made an agreement with Apple by becoming an Apple Developer / installing XCode, installing iTunes, creating an Apple account for an iOS device, etc. and didn't know it. Apple _did_ have to find his email address to email him -- typically large multinationals won't cold-email boilerplate email messages as a first point of contact since this would quickly taint their sending IPs on email block lists. I suspect there was already some sort of business relationship established. [1] http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#licenseAndAuthorship http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#licenseAndAuthorsh...
- bliti 11y agoThanks for the info. You are right, it's probably in one of those agreements from Apple. Wonder how ios devs feel about this.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- obstinate 11y agoI'd say it's a license to read it. Not to republish for commercial purposes. Ianal.
- tracker1 11y agoI wonder if a similar email would work as a defense for distributin OSX on non-apple hardware... well, we sent you an email declaring the terms, and you didn't opt-out... and given you've sent similar emails with similar landmines, you obviously find this to be acceptable in practice, so...
- girvo 11y agoOnly issue with that is that judges really don't like "cute" ways of using the law, so it'd be a very difficult job to have it hold up in court.