Query: what are the protocols for posting the contents of a newsfeed on an intranet site?
We are building an internal site for a particular practice group. The option of including a newsfeed, the content from a blawg, has been proposed, and I'm stumped by the (legal and) ethical questions that might surround this sort of activity.
Reminder: I am not an attorney, so bear with me. My gut reaction is--publishing the full content of someone's newsfeed would be inappropriate, even with attribution. On the flip side, this is what is happening with news aggregators, with versions driven by an individual's subscriptions or more general (think News Is Free).
But what happens if you publish only the excerpts, with links to the full content? Does the distinction between an internet site and an intranet site make a difference? Could an intranet site be considered an aggregator for a practice group? Does the proliferation of news feeds make this sort of distribution the next obvious step? And, even if this is legal, in the sense of not breaking any known laws, is it ethical? Is there a personal/non-commercial versus commercial use distinction that would come into play in this situation?
Any thoughts would be appreciated...I am drawing a distinction here between my understanding of "fair use" (quoting something from a blog, for example) and something like "e-plagiarism" (posting the full content of another person's blog in place of generating your own content).
Comments
Jen - Don't think there's a legal implication here. Since RSS feeds are put up there explicitly for incorporation in other apps (aggregators in particular, but what you're proposing is a kind of group aggregator, right?), I don't see how the owner of an RSS feed could legitimately claim that you're using hte feed in a way that wasn't explicitly expected.
And plagiarism isn't really a concern either, since you're not stripping attribution from the post -- in fact, you'd really *want* the attribution in there so the reader could make their own judgment about the content.
I think you're fine. See this site:
http://www.dupageyoungdems.org/feeds/
for an example of a site I set up for the DuPage County Young Democrats - it's aggregating 2 dozen political feeds on an hourly basis. This is the kind of thing you're thinking about, right?
Posted by: Rick Klau | March 15, 2004 10:37 AM