4 ms·

What'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 agains

by bliti 11y ago

What'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 ago
IANAL 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 ago
  Thanks for the info. You are right, it's probably in one of those agreements from Apple. Wonder how ios devs feel about this.

by bliti 11y ago

thephyber 11y ago

IANAL 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 ago
Thanks for the info. You are right, it's probably in one of those agreements from Apple. Wonder how ios devs feel about this.