Can I republish RSS feeds on my site

There is much debate about whether or not you are allowed to republish the contents of an RSS feed on your site. I revisit this debate every now and again to see if there has been any developments.

• Fair use of RSS
• Why are you abusing RSS
• Are you thinking of republishing RSS feeds

Since last I wombled on about RSS republishing I have seen more and more feeds containing copyright notices. This I believe is a good idea if you are concerned about your feed being republished verbatim without attribution.

The worst offenders

The most blatant republishing of RSS feeds offenders I have seen are those that remove any links from within the feed and then republish with a liberal smattering of Adsense advertising. This is blatantly wrong, bad karma and they will get you.

A simple yes or no will do

The reason RSS was created was to allow easy syndication of content, but I believe in the spirit of personal and fair use. This means that if you want to republish a feed you need to always apply attribution and out of courtesy contact the webmaster to ask permission to reuse their feed.

If the feed contains a copyright warning them the publisher clearly does not want you to republish their feed. If you publish a feed I would suggest you make sure you have a clear warning that appears in your feed.