I've been plunged headon into an absolute chaotic nightmare trying to fully understand the issues of copyright as they apply to newsfeeds.

The short answer is that in terms of the law, copyright wins. You legally cannot show an RSS feed on another website without the express permission of the content owner. There are rare exceptions. The existence of a syndication feed on a website does not grant any rights to the content it contains.

My previous post on why Google can get away with it, is simply because 'they are Google'. According to every document that I've managed to cram in the last few days, they are clearly in violation of copyright law both in letter and spirit. But if you feel infringed, your only choice is a lawsuit - and you will be going up against one of the shrewdest collections of intellectual property lawyers ever assembled. I don't believe anybody has attempted it for Google Reader, although others who have sued Google over copyright infringement have come home with their tail between their legs.

In any other case, posting a newsfeed on another website (in whole or in part) puts you in questionable legal status. Fair use is nebulous. You cannot code fair use into software, and it doesn't offer any protection against getting sued for infringement. It merely gives you some guidelines for a handful of possible defenses.

You can of course view a newsfeed legally on another website if you have the express permission of the copyright owner. But again, this cannot be coded into software, and even then you can't make it available for another person to read - who has not obtained similar permission. This makes Digg, Technorati, Google Reader, and del.icio.us violators in principle, if not in fact. Truncating articles (as some of these sites do) is a defense, it is not a legal standard - and they still could face legal challenges. This is not just limited to RSS/Atom and other syndication formats. It applies to any website content.

If you're a small website operator like me, and you provide any publicly accessible newsfeeds without express permission of the feed owner (or copyright holder), you're technically in violation of U.S. law (this assumes that the U.S. is somehow involved in the content and/or reproduction at issue). Even if members create their own feed sources - but in that case, the members are in violation - not you. You are guilty of facilitating their infringement.

There's only one way out of this mess. Somebody has to sue Google over this issue and lose. Then we'll have some established legal principle. Until then as one writer wrote - 'view a newsfeed, go to jail'. (Though technically copyright law is a civil violation and not a criminal violation).