
How Reuters Should Be Responding To The AP's Suicide - mariorz
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090724/1533155652.shtml
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eli
_"Dear AP: your RSS feed is for syndicating your stories. If you don't want
the content out there, don't syndicate the content!"_

Have to disagree there. Just because my blog has an RSS feed, doesn't mean you
can repost the contents on another site.

As someone who has had spam sites set up based on my feeds, it's pretty
friggin' annoying.

~~~
cesare
I can understand your complaints. But syndication (the last S in RSS acronym)
means exactly that. And that's what the protocol is intended for. Feed readers
came later.

~~~
idiopathic
Posting your content in RSS means you allow anyone to read it. It does not
mean you have granted permission for it to be copied and reposted - as the
copyright holder, others have to ask you for the right to copy the content.
The fact that it is easy to copy does not mean it is legal.

~~~
cesare
If I add a widget with the titles and the teasers of your posts on my website
- technically - I'm not copying anything.

This is what syndication is for. I choose what to syndicate, to add value to
my website. And you gain exposure from appearing on many different websites.
That's why most publish just a teaser of each post and not the full body.

Again, I'm not arguing about what is right (or fair) and what is wrong. I'm
just saying that the protocol has been developed for this use.

~~~
eli
Assuming that the teasers are of an approriate length and meet the standards
for fair use, I see no problem with that.

I like to include full feeds because it greatly improves the experience of
people consuming my content.

------
zitterbewegung
Reuters could do nothing and come out ahead while the AP wastes money on this.
They don't even have to make a statement. All they have to do is not follow
the AP's footsteps.

~~~
eli
Yeah, but the larger issue is that wire services are hurting as some
newspapers fail and others cut back on expenses. Obviously they shouldn't do
what AP is doing, but Reuters probably does have to make some changes to
survive long term.

~~~
rs
Do remember that Reuters is in the information dissemination business. They do
have multiple sources of revenue, and don't have to rely on direct revenues
from the news business.

<http://thomsonreuters.com/about/>

A good example is ThomsonReuters have some excellent trading platforms that
are actually market leaders in their respective asset classes.

------
agnokapathetic
As an aside: Reuters pushed for an open syndication standard--NewsML--back in
2001 (<http://about.reuters.com/newsml/>). It's become a standard endorsed by
the International Press Telecommunications Council.

~~~
gaius
Yep I did a lot of work on that - we rebuilt reuters.com from a normal
corporate site into a news publishing system, ATG Dynamo on top of the TIBCO
back end, running out of an otherwise empty datacentre in New Jersey. Chicken
parm subs for lunch every day. Good times.

ATG's Droplets were way nicer than the EJBs that everyone else was using, but
the writing was on the wall for them... JBoss is only just now catching up to
what ATG had back then.

