Good Blog Posts by Russell Coker

Feed Licenses, Rules, and Syndication Enforcement

Perusing Planet Debian this morning, I came across a couple of cool posts by Russell Coker about blog licensing issues. I enjoyed reading the one featured on Planet Debian because I just happened to be thinking about a "robots.txt" type of file for RSS readers and aggregators. I'm perfectly happy letting people aggregate my blog feeds for their own purpose to read, I'm not so happy about letting blog spammers copy my content to serve on a disorganized amalgamation of nonsensical feeds, in the hopes of generating ad revenue.

Sure, there are licenses like the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial license, which specify for this type of use and against this type of misuse, but I doubt that the blog spammers would obey the license.

Robots.txt is far from perfect, but there are some simple and effective ways to catch the bots that ignore the rules. Block lists are finally starting to work well for my email servers, and I think that their use in blogs and content syndication will increase. I've been monitoring my server logs a lot more lately, and when I discovered MySpace was syndicating my content without even a courtesy user-agent notice, I was compelled to block them. Obviously I can't regularly police my logs, nor would I want to, well maybe I would, but that's not the point. If there was a standard feed syndication exclusion protocol, it would be a start. The big guys would want to behave, and the miscreants could be autoblocked.

I really need to think more about this. In my limited comprehension of copyright law, its fairly difficult to write up the terms and conditions which denote how my company allows its intellectual property to be used, licensed, and reserved. As it stands, the notice on all our pages are "Copyright - All rights reserved", which I think means "you can't copy", and I also think that its only thanks to the fair use clause of the copyright laws which allows search engines to index and cache my content, my audiences to temporarily copy the content to their computer's cache via a browser or RSS aggregator / reader, and so on.

Most property rights are enforced through the maxim - "90% of ownership is possession", which I understand to mean that if you have it in your possession, you can exploit the majority of benefits awarded by ownership. On the internet, it isn't so clear. It definitely helps to own, manage, and operate your own servers, but some technical protocols to control how what you own can be possessed would be nice too. OMG did I just allude to DRM??? Guess so. Hmm, I'm having a little epiphany here: not only is there an important balance to achieve with security, privacy and convenience, there is also a balance that needs to be struck between access, restriction, and convenience. This goes back to why I feel Napster was so popular back in the day - sure it was free, but it was also incredibly convenient. In the end, I think it was the convenience that made people stop shopping the music stores. Along those lines, I love the fact that RSS aggregation readers can make it easier for me to share my thoughts with others.

Again, I really think this will end up being a job for an inexact science. I'm not a fan of DRM because its so strict and often so "dumb". How many people have lost their license keys / serial numbers to software, needed to reinstall, and ended up going bald pulling their hair out? Me too. Rules need to be "breakable" because I can't imagine ever being able to foresee every exclusion to the rule. Speeding for example. Imagine if cars were made to only go 55 miles per hour. Sure, everyone would obey the speed limit. But what if Godzilla attacked? Wouldn't you find justification to break the law? I definitely would. I would drive as fast as my car could take me to get away from that big, fire breathing monster.

I think its the same with content, and I think it boils down to abuse. Letting people break rules and pay the consequences is in my mind a much better method of teaching abstract concepts than simple enforcing strict abstraction. In that case, most people will ask why, and never get a good answer. If people continue to break rules without consequence, I would consider that abusive behavior, and justification for enforcement, a la consequences.

Conditions for Sending Email

Once I visited Russell's site, I found his terrific post on the conditions which must be accepted to send email to his server. I'm apt to write up some of my own, however, I usually refrain from publishing other's writing. I have yet (knock on wood) to get much antagonizing, threatening, or aggressive email, so I'm not sure how I would feel about it or the idea of publishing it. Even when I do publish an email I send to someone, I usually let them know I'm posting it publicly as well, just out of politeness. Most important emails I receive contain "fine print" along the lines of this email is important to us, if its not correct, let us know and delete it, and otherwise, keep it confidential.

I'm not sure who would win in a legal battle if an email was sent with confidential terms to a server which reserves the right to re-publish, but seeing how Russell's terms are only referenced via a url in an SMTP response, sender's would not likely even be aware of the terms before sending their emails. If there was a challenge response system, where the mail would not be delivered until the sender accepted the terms, that would be a different story. In the first case, there is not "meeting of the minds", which although I am not a lawyer, I always use as a basic litmus test for measuring the validity of terms, conditions, agreements, contracts, and all that fun stuff.