Except for one thing I can’t help saying re “What others do with these tools is their responsibility.” As litigation over peer-to-peer file sharing shows, the statement is not always true.

> You are proposing to take entire BBC articles from an RSS feed and redistribute them somehow for publication in full by others, correct?

No. I have not proposed that at all. I have created a service which allows people to input an RSS feed and in return get a feed with the full text content. There is a difference between that and what you suggest.

I’ve been trying to think of an analogy that might make my position clearer. I’m not sure this is the best one but it might do. The copy and paste commands allow you to copy any content you like. You can use them to copy an entire BBC article and republish it somewhere else very easily without the BBC’s permission. Is that a good reason to abolish the copy and paste commands? And would you accuse the creator of the copy and paste commands of “proposing to take entire BBC articles” to republish/redistribute them? I assume you wouldn’t because you recognise it has other benefits. It cuts both ways. The same with Google’s use of yours and other people’s content. The same with my RSS service.

This is the point I made above in response to Matt. It comes down to thinking about why RSS feeds exist – especially partial RSS feeds as they’re the feeds my service is designed for. There are millions of RSS feeds out there. They are not all there because individuals or publishers made a conscious decision to make them available. The same with partial feeds (feeds where the full-text content is not included in the feed).

So why do partial feeds exist? Well one reason I gave earlier is that the decision has simply been made by the content management system or blogging tool an author or publisher uses. As I pointed out above, the very popular blogging software Wordpress (this very site uses it) publishes feeds automatically when you install it. For a long time it published partial feeds for users when they installed it. Recently they switched to full-text feeds by default. So next time we see a website or blog powered by Wordpress and it offers a full-text feed, can we assume that the creator of the site made a deliberate decision to offer a full-text feed and is happy with whatever we do with that feed? What if it’s a partial feed? So knowing that, it seems fair to argue that one reason there are many feeds in existence is simply because Wordpress, the tool, makes them available. And there can be many other reasons too. We simply can’t assume anything about the intentions of the author behind the site.

> If that is so, there is no analogy to Google, which analyzes full text, but presents only short excerpts, with links back to the original publication for the full text.

No, Google also copies the full content and republishes it. If you do a search on Google, you’ll see nearly every result has a ‘Cached’ link. Click on the cached link and you’ll see the content served from Google’s servers. In addition they also save a text-only copy of the content (when viewing Google’s cached copy you’ll see a ‘Text-only version’ link in the top right corner).

> Now, if I have misunderstood your plans, please let me know, because I don’t want to mislead anyone, and I’m happy to correct any misimpressions.

I hope I’ve made my position a little clearer. What I’ve been trying to point out is that the tool itself, like many technologies, is pretty neutral. It could be helping someone (maybe even the publisher of the content itself who’s not so tech-savvy) read and distribute the contents of a site or article to a wider audience. It is “facilitating theft” in the same way the copy and paste commands facilitate theft.

As for my own plans, I’m trying to develop these tools to help smaller publishers, particularly independent, non-corporate media to make their content more accessible for potential readers. The RSS to PDF service is an example of this: http://fivefilters.org/pdf-newspaper/

What others do with these tools is their responsibility.

Now, if I have misunderstood your plans, please let me know, because I don’t want to mislead anyone, and I’m happy to correct any misimpressions.

Also, I’m not an international copyright/intellectual property lawyer. I don’t know exactly what redress anyone might or might not have under UK law. I just know taking someone else’s valuables without permission or compensation is wrong.

> I think Mr. Wardman is being very polite about asking a serious question: Why should the BBC do something to help you steal its content?

I have no interest in the BBC’s content and have never asked them to do anything to help me steal it. In fact, if you want to know my opinion, I think BBC News is pretty awful (see http://medialens.org/alerts/archive.php for many extensive alerts on the BBC’s output) and I’d rather people didn’t use my service and waste my bandwidth on it. I posted here simply to let people know that the option existed – not just for the BBC but for the millions of other sites out there.

> And it is stealing, if you take the full content without permission/remuneration.

I think many people would disagree. Is Google stealing when it indexes your site and the millions of other sites out there? Because it takes your full content and analyses and extracts information from it and even stores a copy of it on its servers. How else would it offer the service that it does?

Thanks for your detailed response – I’m thinking about a reply.

I’d agree that it is all about dividing lines, and that it needs a blog post to just identify the issues – never mind resolve them :-0.

Matt

I think Mr. Wardman is being very polite about asking a serious question: Why should the BBC do something to help you steal its content? And it is stealing, if you take the full content without permission/remuneration. The fact that the Internet makes it easy to steal content, if one is of a that mind, is irrelevant. Stealing is stealing. Why do you think it’s OK?

I think it’s an interesting discussion.

I wrote the code as part of a bigger project to make lesser known sites and blogs more easily accessible. You seem to be arguing that the code will only harm publishers by taking control away from them. That might be one effect, but it can also benefit many other, less tech-savvy, publishers by allowing them to spread their content more widely and to produce newspaper-like PDFs to distribute for very little cost.

>You say that “the idea with the service was not to take control away”,then “many of the independent media sites I had in mind don’t carry ads so I can’t see why they’d object”

The point I was trying to make is the code does have benefits for many publishers and the reason I created the service was not simply to take control away – although it does have that effect too. The most common reason people give against full-text feeds is loss of advertising revenue (“no one will click to visit the site and see the ads”). As the service is targeted at publishers who refuse to carry advertising because of its negative effects, I don’t see why the most common complaint against full-text feeds, and this type of service, would really bother them.

Of course I could be wrong, but this is an ongoing project and when I’ve developed it a little further I will be contacting the publishers/bloggers that I like to work with them on it.

> Further, if they have decided to provide partial feeds – then the only logical conclusion is that they don’t want to provide full feeds.

That might be true of the big players such as the BBC (who knows, Tom’s just pointed out that they do publish some full-text feeds so maybe they’ll switch the rest too), but it’s not “the only logical conclusion”. Many smaller sites either don’t have feeds at all or if they do have partial feeds it’s likely a feature of the CMS/blog package they’re using and not necessarily a deliberate decision to offer partial feeds (or any type of feed – I’m sure I can find bloggers/publishers who have no idea what feeds are or how they can be beneficial).

Wordpress for a long time published partial feeds for users. They’ve now enabled full-text feeds by default. How many Wordpress users know what a feed is or whether their feed is partial or full-text?

>I think the only way such a toolkit can be used ethically is on “opt-in” terms, where each author is asked first, or the T&C of the site are verified.

If it were true that partial feeds exist only because publishers have decided not to offer full-text feeds, then I might understand your position. As I pointed out above, there are many other conclusions you can draw.

> There are a few grey cases round the edge – publishing suppressed evidence, exposee etc.

But full-text content is already copied to many different servers almost as soon as it appears – think of Google’s cache and the many other crawling services. You don’t opt in to those.

> Whether anyone can do anything about it, I don’t know…

I don’t know either. But I think it would be very hard to enforce. Say I desperately wanted full-text access to certain feeds. I’d simply set up my own private instance of the code and there’d be no way for a publisher to know what was going on – there’d be no public URL they could point to as proof. I don’t think that’s a reason to hide the code or put opt-in restrictions on it. I think there are many good uses for the code – it’s a double edged sword.