The subject of feed robbery has surfaced a few times recently – and because it’s getting easier every day to turn RSS feeds into site content, we’re going to see this thing happen more and more.

If you start firing off C&Ds and other legal letters each time you see it, it’s gonna cost you a packet. So… here’s a simple idea I’ve had that may help the situation…

All you need to do is format your feed like this. For each item, include…

1) A 200 (or so) character intro/excerpt of that item.

2) Then include a short, but OBTRUSIVE copyright note that says something like “If this copyright note is being displayed on a website outside of the domain where it was initially published (except for feed aggregators), then the site you are looking at is currently breaking copyright law. Please report it to…. ” Or words to that effect – this needs work.

3) Then include the remainder of the item.

When you publish your feeds, you give permisson for people to syndicate your feeds and display your content, but ONLY those first 200 characters that come before the copyright note.

That way, responsible publishers will only publish those first 200 chars – so no problem. Anyone publishing the full feed on a different site will also be displaying the nasty little copyright notice at that tells everyone they’re breaking the law.

Plus, anyone reading the feed in an aggregator will still get the full feed. Everyone’s happy.

Any thoughts on that?