On Friday, an attorney named Martin Schwimmer asked Bloglines to remove his RSS feed from their service. Martin felt that because Bloglines was providing the full content from his RSS feed it was a violation of his blog’s copyright:

It was brought to my attention that a website named Bloglines was reproducing the Trademark Blog, surrounding it with its own frame, stripping the page of my contact info. It identifies itself as a news aggregator. It is not authorized to reproduce my content nor to change the appearance of my pages, which it does.

Scoble then linked to this, saying that:

The real trick here is: if you don’t want your full posts reprinted somewhere else, don’t put them into RSS. That’s one reason most commercial sites don’t include full content in their feeds. I don’t mind that Bloglines reprints my content and I don’t mind that anyone using an RSS News Aggregator looks at my content without seeing my design or my navigation links or my email address or cell phone number. If I did care, I’d switch my RSS feeds to only shove out partial content, or I’d delete my RSS feed altogether.

Then Winer linked to it (offering no opinion either way) and then Scoble linked to Martin’s reply, providing links to a bunch of bloggers who disagreed with Martin’s stance. Finally, a third time, Scoble linked to Tyme from Blogyourway who disagreed with him and Scoble further explained his position. Obviously Scoble feels this is an important issue or he wouldn’t be linking to it so much this weekend.

My first reaction and subsequent reaction after seeing other bloggers posting about this is: it’s Martin’s blog, people!. If Martin doesn’t want the content on Bloglines he has the right to contact them and say: “you do not have permission to use my feed.” That’s what he did and I don’t see why that’s a problem for anybody except for readers who are using Bloglines to read his blog:

For the 190 of you who subscribe to this site through Bloglines, I apologize for any inconvenience, but I think that you will still find my site easily accessible, here.

These 190 people are the folks that Martin needs to think about here and it seems that he has weighed them into his decision. If he has a high percentage of his subscribers that use Bloglines to read his blog then he just slammed the door in those people’s faces.

Out of curiosity and after all this weekend attention and publicity (which admittedly I’m adding another log to the fire), I just added Martin’s feed to my bloglines account and the graphic at the top of this post displays the results. I find it interesting that the subscription count has actually increased. Martin Schwimmer has grown two Bloglines subscribers! So with all the ebb and flow the net result so far is plus two for Martin’s blog (at least one of which is me, I guess). Wonder what this count will be a week or month from now?

Now for my 2 1/2 rusted pennies to add to this which are definitely way late as far as the blogosphere goes.

First of all, I think there are significant differences between say Google caching the content of a page, which BTW, cached Google pages do not place any advertising around them versus Bloglines providing a service for people to read blogs versus an individual or company taking the full content in an RSS feed and reposting without permission on their blog while framing advertisements around said content. The latter of which Scoble already does with his link blog (which he said he doesn’t profit from, that revenue goes to Kunal). I’m fine with the latter if it results in more traffic to my blog which in most case the publicity does. Where I’d have a problem with it is if it used my content and didn’t result in more traffic. I think that’s the bottom line here, despite the people crying fair or foul to what Bloglines is doing: do you want more readers? Do you want to make reading your blog convenient for readers? That’s partly what RSS is for, IMO: convenience. If you offer an RSS feed you are telling folks you want to make it easier for them to share in your content.

More importantly are the ways by and ease of which individual sites can be blocked by the website/blog owner. For example, every image at my blog is blocked by default from reframing in any site without my express consent (several RSS readers and a few blogs are allowed to do this). How do I do that? Easy, it’s called htaccess.



Check out the Google cache of my blog above and look at all the “can’t see my image” graphics. That’s htaccess at work. Scoble’s link blog used to have the images blocked until I saw that he was giving proper attribution and wasn’t just including the full text there and that he sent good traffic. This is my bandwidth that I pay for on our dedicated servers, and while I don’t mind Scoble and some other sites (like Bloglines) doing this, there is a tradeoff in the exchange: it must be a mutually beneficial arrangement. I think Martin may not be looking at the convenience that Bloglines is providing his readers. Does this mean his readers will never come to his blog? He needs to evaluate the numbers and weigh the scales.

As far as completely blocking Bloglines from doing what they are doing, the same could be true for access to RSS feeds with htaccess. In fact, there was never a reason for Martin Schwimmer to contact Bloglines at all. He could have simply put a DENY FROM line in his htaccess file and Bloglines would have sucked on a 403 Forbidden message. At the technical level there are always ways to deal with these things without needing to make a big deal about it, which, BTW, I don’t think Martin was doing, though Scoble has turned up the heat on him. This weekend Martin, rightly or wrongly has been a poster boy for whether aggregators like Bloglines have fair use for everything in an RSS feed.

Bottom line for this situation is each and every blogger has the right and ability to control who and/or what gains access to their content. The DRM scheme is already there, it’s just a matter of using it or not (on Apache servers, anyway). I’ve used htaccess since this blog opened and proactively and reactively responded to people who link to the blog content here and hotlink our graphics. Hotlinking is, generally speaking, considered bad form on the web because it uses another website’s bandwidth, but when it comes to an increase in traffic, it’s really no different than buying Google adwords, is it? I think Schwimmer just cost himself more traffic to his blog and potential business than simply letting Bloglines continue to serve up his content. It’s his perogative, sure, but was this a good business decision?

Read what other bloggers have to say about this:
Shelley from Burningbird
Phil Haacked (surname has to be a penname)
James Robertson
Udo Schroeter - “The Antiblogger is something like the Antichrist, only for the Blogosphere! Those are the people that give lawyers the bad image. Or something.”
Find more on this discussion via Technorati

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• To have full RSS feeds or not?
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• Private RSS Feeds
• RSS gaining traction traffic-wise, despite naysayers
• RSS Feed cleanup part deux, 250 feeds target