Content Aggregating.. Is it legal ?

By Russell Beattie:

Copyright law is very simple: You create something and its yours. It's not a trademark, or a patent, but a copyright. It's automatically given to you when you create something and if anyone wants to use your content for any reason, they need to ask you. Things like the Creative Commons license and the Gnu license *do not* supersede this basic right. You create something and its yours and you get to do what you want with it, but others need to ask. Period. I see developers all the time get confused about this - they wonder if they can change a license on their work after they've published it. It's *YOUR* copyright, you can do *whatever* you want with it. Licenses are for others.

So this guy is basically saying that all commercial aggregators are illegal, and I think he's right. That includes My Yahoo, BlogLines, MyWireService, etc. You can't take for granted the fact that the content is out there in an RSS format made for syndication. It doesn't matter. In reality it's no more or less formatted than these words are right now. If you want to republish or use someone else's copyrighted material, you have to get permission. Period. That's how it works, digitally packaged up or not. And it doesn't matter if the aggregator is free or not, if it is re-publishing the content (i.e. not from the original source) it's against copyright law.

And again a few months ago:
I can put ads on this site because it's all my content, but on a site with a bunch of external feeds - several of which are marked for Personal Use Only? That doesn't seem either right or legal. The whole idea, actually, of putting ads on other people's content just doesn't seem right. I'm not the only one. Anyone else besides me notice that neither Bloglines, Technorati or Feedster have advertisements? That's nice, but how are these sites going to make money? And how different is aggregating RSS feeds from what Google does (aggregating HTML pages)? I mean, they put ads on a summary of my pages, just like an RSS feed. They also have an archive of my site online as well, which is against my personal copyright of this site, but no one seems to mind just yet. There seems to be this craze for organizing and displaying all the info out there for profit - but I wonder if that's enough "added value" to justify charging for that service. I guess it is, as Technorati, Feedster and NewsGator have all gotten funding.

I wonder how long you can add value to a free service and charge someone money for it? I guess we bottle water, right?

Complete post @ http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008249.html