Legalities of RSS Aggregation

[John Nye]

Hi Everyone,
This might be a bit off topic, but also probably relevant. We're in the final throws of getting the beta ready for ReadHQ.com our RSS product. We're based in the UK and talked to our solicitor about T and C's, Privacy policies etc. This raised a few questions about complying with the terms and conditions of the feed owners.

What is everyone else doing to mitigate risk in this area. I've had a look through the current crop of services and almost no one is publishing a Terms of Service, or Privacy policies on their homepage (in the EU this is a legal requirement).

Is anyone else worried, have any of the old hands experienced take down notices or cease and desists in the past? Are there any resources that deal with this, I've found a few at http://www.niemanlab.org/ but they are very implementation specific, and don't deal with our implementation.

Thanks

John

NimbleWorks LLP

[Gordon Weakliem]

NewsGator never really had any issues that I was aware of. By publishing a feed you're implying consent to aggregate the content so as far as t&c from a publisher's perspective, there's not much to comply with.

Now the one area that got sticky was when NG tried putting ads on the aggregator. Several publishers took exception to this and asked to be removed from our feed fetcher.

Sent from my iPad

Post by John Nye
Hi Everyone,
This might be a bit off topic, but also probably relevant. We're in the final throws of getting the beta ready for ReadHQ.com our RSS product. We're based in the UK and talked to our solicitor about T and C's, Privacy policies etc. This raised a few questions about complying with the terms and conditions of the feed owners.
What is everyone else doing to mitigate risk in this area. I've had a look through the current crop of services and almost no one is publishing a Terms of Service, or Privacy policies on their homepage (in the EU this is a legal requirement).
Is anyone else worried, have any of the old hands experienced take down notices or cease and desists in the past? Are there any resources that deal with this, I've found a few at http://www.niemanlab.org/ but they are very implementation specific, and don't deal with our implementation.
Thanks
John
NimbleWorks LLP
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[Brian Reischl]

There was some discussion about this a month or two ago. Have a look in the
mailing list archives. But the upshot was basically what Gordon just said.

One thing to keep in mind is what you're doing with the content. If you're
just getting it to show for some user, then you're just acting as an agent
for that user. If you're going to do something else (eg, run sentiment
analysis on the content) and resell it, then that might be a different
legal issue. But I am not a lawyer, and I'm sure as heck not a solicitor or
barrister or anything like that either. :)

Post by Gordon Weakliem
NewsGator never really had any issues that I was aware of. By publishing a
feed you're implying consent to aggregate the content so as far as t&c from
a publisher's perspective, there's not much to comply with.
Now the one area that got sticky was when NG tried putting ads on the
aggregator. Several publishers took exception to this and asked to be
removed from our feed fetcher.
Sent from my iPad
Hi Everyone,
This might be a bit off topic, but also probably relevant. We're in the
final throws of getting the beta ready for ReadHQ.com our RSS product.
We're based in the UK and talked to our solicitor about T and C's, Privacy
policies etc. This raised a few questions about complying with the terms
and conditions of the feed owners.
What is everyone else doing to mitigate risk in this area. I've had a look
through the current crop of services and almost no one is publishing a
Terms of Service, or Privacy policies on their homepage (in the EU this is
a legal requirement).
Is anyone else worried, have any of the old hands experienced take down
notices or cease and desists in the past? Are there any resources that deal
with this, I've found a few at http://www.niemanlab.org/ but they are
very implementation specific, and don't deal with our implementation.
Thanks
John
*NimbleWorks *LLP
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[Faisal N Jawdat]

Post by Gordon Weakliem
NewsGator never really had any issues that I was aware of.

The regulatory environment has changed since NewsGator shut down its service, particularly in Europe. European laws (with some variation by nation) require consent for any user tracking. If you aren't setting cookies or otherwise tracking users this is less of an issue, but devs should probably run it by their lawyers if they're in Europe.

-faisal

[Gordon Weakliem]

That's 2 good points - first that things have changed since 2007 when I last did this stuff day-to-day and and second, there's the issue of the T&C between the aggregator and consumer. I think the basic use case is pretty safe but as Brian mentioned, if you're trying to extract some value add based off analyzing user behavior, that could definitely get you into problems. Google is probably the best model here, both in terms of how it's done and how to get in regulatory trouble :)

http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/

 
--
Gordon Weakliem
http://www.eighty-twenty.net


________________________________
From: Faisal N Jawdat <***@faisal.com>
To: Technical discussion of RSS syncing. <rss-***@lists.ranchero.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 11:30 AM
Subject: Re: Legalities of RSS Aggregation

Post by Gordon Weakliem
NewsGator never really had any issues that I was aware of.

The regulatory environment has changed since NewsGator shut down its service, particularly in Europe. European laws (with some variation by nation) require consent for any user tracking. If you aren't setting cookies or otherwise tracking users this is less of an issue, but devs should probably run it by their lawyers if they're in Europe.

-faisal

[John Nye]

Thats interesting and helpful, it's a shame because some of the more interesting stuff that could happen in a feed reader needs to take advantage of having access to the content.

I think we'll be toning down our ambitions a little bit whilst we decide what type of risk (or lawyers cost) we want.

Thanks for the help

-John

Post by Gordon Weakliem
That's 2 good points - first that things have changed since 2007 when I last did this stuff day-to-day and and second, there's the issue of the T&C between the aggregator and consumer. I think the basic use case is pretty safe but as Brian mentioned, if you're trying to extract some value add based off analyzing user behavior, that could definitely get you into problems. Google is probably the best model here, both in terms of how it's done and how to get in regulatory trouble :)
http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/
--
Gordon Weakliem
http://www.eighty-twenty.net
Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 11:30 AM
Subject: Re: Legalities of RSS Aggregation

Post by Gordon Weakliem
NewsGator never really had any issues that I was aware of.

The regulatory environment has changed since NewsGator shut down its service, particularly in Europe. European laws (with some variation by nation) require consent for any user tracking. If you aren't setting cookies or otherwise tracking users this is less of an issue, but devs should probably run it by their lawyers if they're in Europe.
-faisal
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RSS-Sync mailing list
http://lists.ranchero.com/listinfo.cgi/rss-sync-ranchero.com
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http://lists.ranchero.com/listinfo.cgi/rss-sync-ranchero.com