In common with most serious blogs, you’ve probably noticed that we have a large orange button to the side of this post. For anyone who’s not sure what it is, it acts as a notice that we allow people to subscribe to & read our blog via an RSS feed. This means that readers don’t have to constantly come back to the site to see what new posts have been added.

For anyone serious about content creation as a way of driving search engine rankings via increased in-bound links, or simply as an old fashioned traffic or brand builder, it’s an essential tool. But as Brian Vuyk notes, many unscrupulous site owners are using the simple existence of an RSS feed as an excuse to scrape that site’s content.

Brian makes some very salient points as to why this isn’t really a water-tight argument, but he also offers some very sensible tips on how to avoid even getting into a position where you have to dispute the legality or otherwise of what is basically a form of theft.

Make sure that you explicitly state what your RSS feed allows people to do with your content, i.e. - you can read it, but you can’t just paste it on your site to make money!

Whether or not you consider yourself a publisher, if you have useful content on your site (whether it be hints & tips, news, entertaining articles, or even just an insider’s point of view on your particular sector), make sure that you have T&Cs stating your position on the re-use of that content.

Because when a company like e-consultancy can (deservedly) win the Online Business Publisher of the year at the AOP (Assoc. of Online Publishers) awards (although I would have liked to see the AOP really shake up the industry by awarding it to Yahoo! or Google), then surely we are all publishers and need to protect our copyright accordingly.

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