If Berkman Center director John Palfrey wanted a debate on RSS and the future of Web-based media, which he hinted at almost two years ago, he has certainly gotten his wish. The debate over what his website, Top Ten Sources, is doing with RSS feeds continues — and while the debate has evolved somewhat, as Adam Green describes at Darwinianweb, there are still some strong feelings on either side.
Shelley over at Burningbird, for example, has a post about what Top Ten Sources is doing, and she is a lot less wishy-washy about it than Om Malik is. She says it is wrong, plain and simple — and her position isn’t tempered at all by the fact that John Palfrey runs Harvard’s Berkman Center on Internet and Society. She accuses him of trying to “wave the Web 2.0 wand” and change copyright law.
There is some interesting discussion in the comments about what is implied when you “publish” your blog through RSS, and whether Top 10 using it is just like Bloglines or anyone else. Dave Winer (who is a fellow at the Berkman Center) has a post in which he argues that Top Ten Sources is a good thing, but as lawyer Denise Howell of Bag & Baggage points out, the law is far from clear.
For what it’s worth, I think if you publish an RSS feed, then someone like Top Ten Sources should be free to run it on their site, provided they source it properly, link to it and don’t sell ads (which they don’t). I think it would be better if they didn’t do full feeds, but that’s debatable. I think Shelley’s position is overly harsh. Like coldcoffee says, if you don’t want people to run your stuff, then don’t publish a feed — let your friends come to the site, or subscribe via email.
John Palfrey has a post in which he seems open to continuing the discussion (as he should be), and he points to Susan Mernit’s post as making a valuable point — which is that bloggers might be a lot more open to such aggregation if they saw some benefit coming back to them. Lots of food for thought.