A lot of people are commenting on the Trademark Blog’s decision to drop out of the Bloglines online feed reader.
As a matter of copyright, this seems to be rather straightforward. Bloglines is republishing the Trademark Blog on their site. I think they need permission for that. At least for the future every blog author should be free to deny that permission for whatever reason, or even for no particular reason whatsoever.
The Trademark Blog uses a Creative Commons license that allows republishing except for commercial uses. So one would need to ask if Bloglines is a “commercial” use. That is probably difficult to deny.
It is however a different question if blog authors should follow the Trademark Blog example and take their blogs down at all commercial online feed reading services.
As a reader, I don’t agree with those like Horns who say they can’t be bothered to manually click on the original site to retrieve a blog. If it is worth my time to read it, it is certainly worth the split second I need to click on a link.
And as an author I also prefer readers who take the time and initiative to click on some link to get my blog on the screen.
But that doesn’t mean I would not value those who prefer automatic delivery. And online feed readers like bloglines should work out to save my bandwidth, since they can serve multiple subscribers by grabbing my blog content only once.
Have a comment? Please visit the pagerank zero shadow site.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at January 19, 2005 08:40 PM | TrackBack