. . . then you should read this clause from a TOS:

The license granted in these TOS does not constitute a transfer or sale of ____’s ownership rights in the ____ Database. ____ retains all right, title, and interest in and to the ___ Database including all related intellectual property rights. You will use your best efforts to prevent and protect the contents of the ______ Database from unauthorized use or distribution. You must not rent, lease, sublicense, sell, assign, loan, distribute, transmit, or otherwise transfer any content of the service, including the ____ Database, or your rights and obligations pursuant to the TOS. You must not copy, reproduce, alter, modify, create derivative works, or publicly display any content of the Service, including the _____ Database, unless expressly authorized in the TOS.

This is from paragraph 6 of Blogline’s TOS.

p.s. I also quote from Blogline’s Acquisition FAQs:

Bloglines, like any aggregator, requires a license to display, distribute and promote the feeds we serve and the content you post — otherwise, we could not provide this service. Bloglines’ license is for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your content in connection with the service.

I, like Denise, wonder what license it refers to.

 

News.com is reporting that Ask Jeeves will buy Bloglines.  There is a paragraph on my request to ask Bloglines to remove my feed (if you’re coming here from the news.com article after reading the original post, this subsequent post may address some of your reactions).

The article speculates that the attraction of buying an aggregator is the potential for ‘expanding paid links to RSS Feeds and Blogs.’  However, an Ask Jeeves officer is quoted as saying that the company has no immediate plans to sell advertising, and that various models, including subscriptions, are being considered.  The  Bloglines press release mentions enhanced search of blog content using Jeeves’ Teoma engine.

The purchase offers an opportunity to advance the debate regarding third-party commercial use of RSS Feeds. 

To answer a specific question posed to me recently:  the sponsored links on a Google or Technorati results page are placed on, and clearly originate with, their ‘value-add’ pages, which make lawful fair-use of the underlying content.  Advertising by an aggregator on a portal page or other ‘specific-blog neutral’ page would, imho, also, not raise copyright or trademark concerns.

However, in my view, placing contextual advertising adjacent to a full-text copy of a blog page raises both copyright and trademark concerns, as does the commercial use of subscriber information. 

As an aside, I’m not as concerned by the idea of an aggregator using a subscription model – like the license fee for news reader software, the fee is clearly tied to the value-add of the aggregator service, and is not a commercial use of any particular blog.

Whether use such as contextual advertising or subscriber-list mining exceeds any implied license created by the making available of a RSS feed is, as Denise points out, not yet the subject of firm case law (although in my view the implied license extends only to the reproduction of the feed and not to commercial use).   I think that the copyright owner’s explicit prohibition of such use (in the form of, for example, a NCC license) removes most of that ambiguity – it exceeds the explicit license.

(Again I want to point out that in my specific instance, Bloglines immediately complied with my request to remove the feed – although I think its “That blog does not exist” error message is funny but a little heavy handed).

I therefore propose the following to Ask Jeeves and other full-text aggregators. 

Bearing in mind that there will likely be only a few full text web-based aggregators in the future, making complete waiver of copyright a pre-condition for using RSS, is a bit much.  Offer a choice to bloggers: if they elect a NCC (or NCC-type) option, you would include their feed without contextual advertising or subscriber-list mining.

Again, it’s my guess that the numbers that will pursue this option will be small enough that your model will still work.

NY Times article giving reasons on why Google may have become an ICANN-accredited registrar.  Reasons include:

1.  Google’s statement that it did so ‘to learn more about the domain name system’ and to ‘increase the quality of our search results.’

2.  Bret Fausett’s speculation that now Google can get access to the expiring domain name list.  His Times quote implies that if Google became aware that there was a change in title due to expiration, Google would presumably revise downward that page’s Google rank.  “Name-Grabbers” reportedly snap up expired domain names and then use Google’s AdSense program to take advantage of the ‘skeleton of links’ leading to the expired name.

3.  Domain Name registration would be a value-add to its Blogger and GMail services.

Among the reasons not given:

4.  Making money selling domain names.  While some people continue to pay NSI and Register.com $35 a year for a name that costs the Registrar $6 in registry fees, companies like Yahoo and GoDaddy have pushed the price of new registrations to below $6.

5.  Eligibiilty to participate in Registrar Consittuency Mailing List and learn RC secret handshake.