With the advent of the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, copyright law got a lot trickier. Labeled "really simple stealing" by AOL's Jason Calacanis, there is still no clear-cut legal precedent about implied consent to repurpose syndicated content, but the legal system that protects search engines may also green-light spammy content aggregators.



Here's the predicament:

A content provider distributes his or her content through the use of an RSS feed. This feed is open to any who would subscribe. The first question is: Is there an implied consent to repurpose that material by republishing it (with proper credit) on a blog or Website? The act of syndicating (distributing) content may imply that permission.

The second question is: How are splogs (spam blogs) that are set up as aggregators of content to attract keyword-driven traffic, that publish only the headline and snippet of text, that link out to the original source, and that make money from AdSense different from Google and other search engines? Doesn't Google do, essentially, the same thing? The short answer is that the legal system hasn't really decided for certain.

But copyright holders have caught up with Google, whose News and Book Search offerings have gotten the company sued in several countries, including the U.S., France, and Belgium. U.S. courts so far have held up Google's right to index copyrighted content.

Google says its right to offer headlines, titles, and snippets of content is supported by a standing policy to allow content owners to opt out of indexing.

From the Google Blog:

Even if use of their work would be perfectly legal, we respect the wishes of content owners. For example, if a content owner asks us to remove his or her content from our web search results, we do.

If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we take the paper's stories out. And if publishers would prefer not to have their books included in Google Book Search, we honor their request. It's simple: we always allow content owners to opt out - quickly and easily.

And Google does have a payment agreement with the Associated Press for the right to repurpose its content.

Aggregator splogs, however, do not offer an opt-out provision, effectively ignoring any objections from the content owner. Even this, technically, may be legal, if implied consent is present.