How to protect your RSS feed from 3rd party.

Last night, I was wandering around on the internet and found a post title that caught my attention. “Robocoop ignores copyright” I’d like to share this post and comments.

First of all, I have to agree 100% with Brian E. & B. I believe that they’re same person.

Brian E Says:
August 17th, 2006 at 9:12 pm
Hi Ann, I read your blog on 43people and/or on google.com/ig. I’m not quite sure why you publish an RSS feed if you don’t want other sites to aggregate it. Some subscription feeds require a unique key in order to access them.For web aggregatiors, in which you can add any RSS feed, it would seem to be impossible for the site owners to read the copyrights the feeds they receive. In the case of your feed, there is not copyright in it. Google and every other search engine will index your site, and sell ads on their website, unless your robots.txt file forbids them from doing this.FWIW, 43people doesn’t have ads on your syndicated page, and there is no reference to a copyright inside your RSS feed. People who want to read and/or leave comments are going to come to your site anyway.If you simply don’t include the rss link in your site, most people are not going to know it exists.

B Says:
August 21st, 2006 at 8:13 pm
*ahem*
http://codex.wordpress.org/Customizing Feeds
http://www.feedburner.com
Syndicate what you don’t mind people republishing, don’t syndicate what you don’t want them to republish. Embed a link to your site in every feed post if you want. Embed your whole damn copyright if you want. Syndicate only the first 5 words if that’s all you can part with.The power’s in your hands, huntress. Your time might be better spent learning how to control the situation instead of conspiring to bring down those who take advantage of your carelessness. They are merely syndicating your syndication feed, after all.

Brian E & B have excellent point. I fully understand that Spamhuntress doesn’t like other people republish her feeds. But they’re not doing anything wrong including LiveJournal, Technorati, and others. She should have attached copyright to all her posts before syndicate or provide RSS feed.

Here’s how to protect your contents or add copyright disclosure to your RSS feeds. If you’re using WordPress, you can get a plugin from wordpress to add or embed copyrights so that you can trackdown who’s violating your rights. The plugin is called Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter. You can read his post on how to protect your RSS feed.

True, I was reading Spamhuntress because of her RSS feed through Atom. If she provided a feed that only display titles like she mentioned in her Copyright disclosure I wouldn’t be there. She didn’t even define the splogs either.

I hope she feels little better because I just became Spamhuntress’s another regular reader.