Seems I got locked out of the forum that was accusing me of all manner of illegal behavior for the way my websites (used to) use newsfeeds. I merely asked what I was doing that they felt was wrong, and how I might rectify it. 

If you've arrived here trying to find out what all the fuss is about, sorry, but I'm no longer able to respond directly to the accusations made.

But there's more. I'm going to use your esteemed Google Reader as an example, since this was used as a shining example of how to publish/republish newsfeeds in a non-infringing manner. 

It was claimed that many sites can get away with publishing newsfeeds because they only contain snippets, and not a complete copy of the original copyrighted work. Further that they do not republish this information to third parties.

It just ain't so. I went to Google Reader and plugged in a feed URL for one of my web properties. Up came my newsfeed. Now lets take a look... hmmm. I don't see snippets of my articles. I see the complete articles. The whole tomato. 

But wait, there's more. The argument is that Google just creates this list on the fly, so isn't storing and republishing protected work.  

Then how come I see a full copy of every article I've ever written since Google Reader came into existence? Everything. Tell me, I'd like to know. I'll tell you. It's because somebody else subscribed to my feed, and Google made a copy of every article that has ever been read on my site, and is republishing it to anybody who accesses that feed URL. My feed only contains 20 recent items. But everything is there, even articles which have been deleted from my website. 

The only way this could happen is if they make a (complete) copy of every article, and republish it on their website. No different than anything which I did, and in fact they publish a whole lot more than I ever did for a given feed. I only provided a snapshot of the current feed, and the ability to import one or two articles a day from a few select feeds.

So Google Reader has the ability, and is actively creating copies of every weblog for which it is provided a feed - providing an alternate to ever visiting the source website, and without regard to copyright issues; and republishing this to the world. Exactly what I was accused of doing.  

Google as you may or may not know is pretty much exempt from copyright restrictions under the fair use clause. They have argued successfully that they can copy pretty much anything that has ever been written. But I can't - because I'm not Google, and fair use apparently only applies to large U.S. corporations with lots of lawyers.

But since I've been locked out of the dialog, the idiots who have accused me of wrong doing will probably never see this.

As I told folks on that forum before I was locked out, if you really want to protect your writings, don't publish them, and certainly don't syndicate them. And if you don't want your entire site to be cloned, certainly don't syndicate full articles.

It's too late to bring back news on this site. I'm done with it. Heck, I'll just use Google Reader and save some disk space, not have to worry about foul language and XSS injections and all the other mess that comes with importing content from the wild.

It's a bit of an inconvenience to those who had a desire to use this software as it was envisioned, to create personalized websites of personalized content compiled from their favorite sources around the globe. But nobody was really using any of that functionality anyway.  They were just letting me subscribe to interesting feeds and using it to see glimpses of the blogosphere that they wouldn't have seen otherwise. 

Oh well. I've got better things to do.  

I really don't even want to talk about it, but you can see the remnants all over my website. Had some heated debate about intellectual property and specifically how it relates to RSS/Atom newsfeeds. Seems a large number of people think that it's really bad to show a newsfeed to a third party (goes by the term 'republish') - although I fail to see where one could possibly draw a line. A feed is a feed. So for the present time until I can figure out how to make everybody happy, I've disallowed the viewing of news items by non-members; and culled from the ranks of our esteemed collection of eclectic news sources any information provider with less than 1000 viewers/day.

This means to see news articles which didn't originate on this site you will have to login. It also means you can't share these news articles with non-members. And it also means you won't be seeing Junk Drawer, Frog and Goat, Fragments from Floyd, or any of your other favorite small blogs here anymore, unless you import them yourself for your own personal viewing. Please contact me if you have any troubles working out the feed settings. If I import them and allow you to read them it is considered republishing, and that's really bad.

I'm keeping the larger newsfeeds at the present time because these are primarily professionals who have no issue publishing or re-publishing their content assuming full attribution is provided.

The place to apply controls is in the feed itself and anybody who's been around the syndication space for a while knows that. Many novices don't understand that they control their own destiny and can include anything, everything, or nothing in their published syndication feed. If you include everything but object to how it is used by third parties, it's kinda' like taking your clothes off in the middle of the street and then complaining because somebody saw you naked.