Using RSS To Plagiarise Or Participate?

Zoli Erdos has two good posts (here and here) that aggregate pointers to and comment on some of the recent happenings in the space regarding the RSS (Really Simple Syndication protocol - feels kind of weird to do the acronym first then the longhand). Suffice it to say that Jason Calacanis has called plagiarism through RSS, "Really Simple Stealing".

For those playing at home, RSS is a mechanism for distributing information like blog posts. It is a machine-to-machine protocol that's been around for awhile but is gaining a lot of interest as of recent. A venture capital firm recently announced raising $100 millionish for RSS investments.

I suspect there's an inherent problem with the "really simple" aspect of RSS. If one wants to prevent full text information from being blatantly copied, then one probably has to atomize the blog posts and/or add an authenticated signature that cannot be separated. RSS will no longer be really simple then. To prevent plagiarism, units of data would have to be "really signed" (Really Signed Syndication?). RSS became more widely used in the blogging and news community because of the simplicity.

As for using the RSS protocol to increase multi-network participation of bloggers, I could see this being done, and the use will likely get richer over time. 21Publish uses RSS in its authoring interface to integrate external blogs into a blogging community at various levels.

Comments

[Darren]

Seems to me it's the same problem with the sharing of any information. It's not clear to me what signing of the data would accomplish. Images can have signatures too, but I've still seen people easily steal images from professional photographers and use them as their own images.

In the end, it looks like the DMCA is the only recourse in case where someone is stealing content.