Cory Doctorow asks:
When you put up an RSS link, why should we all assume an implied license to aggregate, read, download, spindle, fold and mutilate it just the same way that we assume a license to download web-pages, view their source, cache them, block their popups and images and so forth?
Probably he wanted to say "why shouldn't we all assume". I will try an answer to that question.
The reason: Decisions about licenses are not based on what users "assume", but what copyright holders want. If I want to give everyone a license to mirror my blog except Google, because I think they are in the spyware business now, that is the license. If I decide I don't want to give any license at all to anybody, all "assumptions" of users will be just wrong.
Exceptions and limitations are a different story. Those are laid down by copyright law, not by the one-sided declaration of what some copyright holder wants.
Under European law, there is only one Internet-specific exception. That is for caching content. You don't have a right to "cache" web pages unless you either get a license from the copy right holder or you operate in the limits of that exception, which does not give Google or other search engines the right to a wholesale cache of the whole Web, for example.
And a "right to mutilate" RSS feed content? Like, I could go ahead and correct the grammar error in Doctorow's question above without asking him, or strip the ads from the BoingBoing feed and replace them with my own ads?
So I would agree with what he said, not with what he meant. Why should we all assume an implied license where there is none.
Comments and trackbacks are welcome in the Google-free zone at k.lenz.name/discuss.
Update: Doctorow's post has been changed. It now says "shouldn't".
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at May 10, 2005 11:13 AM