Issues

However, as always there are a lot of legal ramifications when it comes to content scraping. Some people say that because you made an RSS feed this means that the content of that feed is free for everyone’s consumption. While this is true the problem is that some subscribers go beyond simply perusing the content and use the content they get from the feeds and post in their own blogs or websites without the permission of the owner and sometimes even without giving credit to the owner. This is of course a clear violation of copyright laws. The problem is that since RSS feeds are open to just about anyone it makes it easier for content scrapers to go about stealing other people’s work.

Because of this some say that if you don’t want your content stolen then you’d better not use RSS feeds. This is of course preposterous because: 1) content scrapers and plagiarists will continue their deeds with or without RSS feeds, 2) you will be denying your legitimate visitors a very good service if you don’t have RSS feeds, and 3) you will be giving up the benefits that having RSS feeds will have on your SEO efforts.

Another ethical issue that arises from the use of RSS feeds is RSS scraping. RSS scraping goes even one step further than content scraping. Instead of simply scraping the content from RSS feeds generated by the websites RSS scraping converts content that is still in HTML format to RSS feeds. This is more like the old style of content scraping and like the old style of content scraping isn’t necessarily good nor evil. What RSS scrapers do is that they automatically identify items suitable for RSS by analysing the mark-up on a web page. The RSS scrapers then themselves generate the RSS feeds they want without having to wait for a website to release their own feeds. The downside to this kind of scraping is the resulting feeds are usually of lower quality than feeds tailor-made by the websites. Some websites though don’t mind RSS scrapers and even insert special HTML tags to assist scraping programs and so yield feeds of better quality. In cases like this where the website is obviously open to RSS scraping then there ought to be no problem, however, if a website obviously not aware of any scraping going on then this activity is obviously illegal.