When we first started offering an RSS feed for Lucire in the late 2000s, we set it up to work as we did on other sites: providing users with full feeds. In the early 2000s, when I began blogging, I understood that full feeds were preferred.
This previous month, however, saw a record number of complaints issued by us against parties who had appropriated our content to put on their sites. A lot of the content stolen were our features, which required manual intervention. However, in some cases, they were automated and taken from our RSS.
Since we have certain conditions we have to observe to team members and licensors, we have to protect our content. We do this in as friendly a way as possible, by notifying the owner of the site first and initially asking them to reduce the content to an excerpt.
Unfortunately, in the majority of cases, the site publishers ignore these requests—which, I might add, are totally absent of threatening language or legalese. This leads us to enquire with their hosts. Almost all web hosts have a policy forbidding copyrighted content appearing on their servers without permission.
We’d like to switch the RSS feeds to offer only a summary, but would like to know what regular users thought of this idea.
I am a subscriber to the feeds myself, and on my system, with the increase in video content, I am finding that I need to come to the site anyway. The images (through the Feedburner service, at least) don’t come through in my emails. For a fashion title, images are pretty important.
Please pop by to the site to let us know your thoughts, or contact us through our feedback form privately. We know we’re asking honest users to consider a change because of a few dishonest people.
If you feel strongly that the status quo should be maintained, let us know, and we can review the situation if we find the piracy increases. If you don’t mind one way or the other, please also let us know. And if you’ve suggestions, they’re also welcome, though bear in mind we have our hands tied on a lot of content when it comes to Creative Commons. We’d like a fair representation of comments, and we thank you in advance.—Jack Yan, Publisher
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