Legal considerations of blog and podcast aggregation

Date: Thu Aug 02 2007
You might think that someone posting their content through an RSS feed makes it open for anybody to utilize. Think again.

Please don't steal this Web content is a story of one perspective. That publishing content on a website is still covered by copyright, that publishing that content through an RSS or Atom feed is still covered by the copyright, and that many websites have been set up which republish RSS feed content without permission.

Is there a copyright notice on the source web site? Is there one in the RSS/Atom feed? If there is not a copyright notice, is there a defacto copyright to consider? How does fair use apply? What are the required steps such as attribution, excerpting, presentation, etc?