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.

>Well, I don’t think publishers have much control on the web - once it’s published it’s fairly trivial to extract the content … no one can force us to put up with partial-text feeds.

I think you’ve avoided the core of the question. I’ve asked about authors’ legal and moral rights, and you’ve just said “they don’t have much control, and it’s easy to take their content”.

I know it’s easy (though only for a minority), but that says nothing about respecting the rights of the publisher - unless you are taking a position that says “if it can be done, it must be OK”.

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”

Whether they have ads or not is immaterial if you are trying not to take control away. The essence of respecting that content providers have control is to ask them and abide by what they say. The minute you make the decision without reference to the author (”I don’t see why they’d object”), and don’t explicity ask them, taking control away is exactly what you’ve done - or you have helped others to do by providing an open source toolkit.

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

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.

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

Whether anyone can do anything about it, I don’t know. My T&C, for example, include the stipulation that republication without explicit permission may be charged at $250. That is there in case the Daily Mail or other media ever copy content, but it would also cover recreating full feeds.