How to Protect your RSS Feeds from Unscrupulous Aggregator’s
Recently there has been a plethora web based aggregator sites. Some of them like diabetologica blatantly displays the full content from the feed. So now you work hard to create your content and unscrupulous aggregators like diabetologica reap the benefits by displaying them along with their own advertisements. If that doesn't sound fair to you, then read on how to protect your content.
One way would be to give out only excerpts in your feed. Some find it objectionable. Personally I think it is a valid approach. However I have chosen a second approach as described below.
A very simple technique would be to append your copyright message to the end of your content. A stern warning to the effect that if it is being viewed outside of a personal aggregator then it may be violating copyright, should act as an active deterrent.
I have started providing full content feed. I am fine so long it is viewed from a personal aggregator. However if someone decides to display it in totality in his website, then I have objections.
The copyright statement I currently append to Simple Thoughts Feed is:
© 2005 blog.taragana.com. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@taragana.com so we can take legal action immediately.
As it is appended to the content of the feed items, it will only be visible if the full feed content is displayed. However it will not be displayed where feed excerpt is only provided.
Obligatory Disclaimer: IANAL (I am not a lawyer). This does not construe legal advice. Talk to your lawyer before you decide on your course of action.
Technical Note: It has been implemented as a WordPress Plugin.
If you would like me to release it in Open Source, please let me know in comments. I have decided to move forward if I get at least 50 responses. That would justify my efforts 
What are your thoughts on this issue?
Update: You can download the Angsuman's Feed Copyrighter Plugin for WordPress (1.5 and above) to protect your feed items with copyright message.
Filed under CMS Software, Headline News, How To, Pro Blogging, Web, Web Hosting, WordPress | Tags: Open Source | 
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June 16th, 2005 at 7:32 am
$content = preg_replace(”/© 2005 <a href="http://blog.taragana.com/">blog.taragana.com</a>. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@taragana.com so we can take legal action immediately./”,”",$content);
June 16th, 2005 at 7:33 am
with escapes and all. you get the point.
June 16th, 2005 at 8:02 am
Sure you can preg_replace it. But that is intentional copyright violation.
Also who guarantees that I am not going to change the text from time to time
June 16th, 2005 at 11:13 am
I’m not seeing the full feed at http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/feed/
June 16th, 2005 at 12:54 pm
@BillySaysThis
Can you please elaborate. AFAICS it is giving out full content feed. However WP has a BUG which prevents it from giving out all the pages in a multi-paged article (sample).
Are you referring to that?
Otherwise everything is as it should be.
June 16th, 2005 at 11:27 pm
I’m using the Feedview extension for Firefox, I just clicked the link to see yur feed. I only get the excerpts.
June 17th, 2005 at 3:35 am
@BillySayThis That is most likely a configuration issue with Feedview extension. It is configured (default?) to display only excerpts. However if you use any other Feed aggregators like Newzcrawler or Feeddemon or FeedReader etc. you will be able to view the full content of the post.
June 17th, 2005 at 4:30 am
Quite right. But I imagine the unscrupulous user who steals your content will not care much about a further copyright infringement.
June 19th, 2005 at 1:09 am
@BillySayThis Let me know if your problem was resolved.
@Denis But I imagine the unscrupulous user who steals your content will not care much about a further copyright infringement.
Look at it from the thief’s point of view. If hundreds of bloggers, he is aggregating from is using this then the viability of his system becomes questionable unless he wants to have the big fat threatening copyright infringement messages sticking out from each of his “original” post which doesn’t do a world of good for his credibility.
So he is left with the option of filtering each feed to eliminate the copyright messages. And they can come in different shapes and flavor. I can as easily have them randomized
So now not only he has to learn programming but also he has to be on constant vigil over scores of blogs looking for changes to theior copyright messages. At that point he will soon realize it may be wiser and simpler to look for an alternative vocation. This is pretty much what I am hoping for.
June 19th, 2005 at 3:27 pm
This is great! Please show us how you did it, or please release the plugin.
June 19th, 2005 at 9:32 pm
@MacManx I am still fine tuning the plugin and adding more features.
June 19th, 2005 at 11:13 pm
I can’t wait! ^_^
June 20th, 2005 at 2:28 pm
Normally I hate “me too” comments but what MacManX said!
And you said you wanted 50 comments. I can leave another 37 if that’ll help
Tom
June 28th, 2005 at 1:42 am
To MacManx, Tom Raftery and others:
The WordPress Plugin to automatically add copyright messages to your full content feed is now available for download.
September 14th, 2005 at 1:34 pm
[...] I also strongly recommend Angsuman Chakraborty’s article on protecting your RSS feed. [...]
December 28th, 2005 at 12:49 am
[...] This plugin adds a copyright message to your feed items. No customization is required. This acts as a deterrant to feed-stealers (you heard the word first here) who unscrupulously and blatantly displays your full feed contents (often with their own advertisements) in their site(s) without your permission. [...]
March 3rd, 2006 at 6:15 am
So is this still not released!?!?
With the invention of autobloggerpro (ARGH) and it being coupled with wordpress in its installation - we’re all in dire need of something like this to protect us.
copyscape.com is great, but who can afford to pay that amount of money and do all that checking up on things?
September 14th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
Is there a similar plugin for Blogger users? I’ve unfortunately been plagiarized by a rather unscrupulous website and appending accusatory messages/posts have not been able to put a stop to it all.
September 27th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
[...] I’ve found a Wordpress plugin that does this very thing. (Note: I haven’t actually used this plugin myself, but in theory it sounds like it should work). The publisher of the feed copyright plugin, also has a great article on protecting your RSS feeds. Check it out. [...]
November 9th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Well, stumbled over this ideas over here. To prevent filtering out the appended copyright text one could include for example the timestamp or any formatted date with time into the copyright notice. That would make it virtually impossible to filter it out with a script since everytime the feed is getting called, the copyright-notice would be different. Just an idea…