Legal Ramifications of Re-posting RSS content to your own site(s) without permission?

[beyond.domaining]

Does anyone have any good information on the legal ramifications of re-posting RSS content to your own sites without the web site owners' prior permission?

I have heard conflicting information on the topic.

Some of my sources say that as long as the blog / web site owner does not specifically say that you are not allowed to re-post their content, then it is OK. i.e. that making their content available via RSS *without any requirements or notices indicating that you are prohibited from re-posting the content or using the content for commercial purposes without prior consent* is an implicit license to do with the content what you want. i.e that by virtue of them making content available via RSS, you can do whatever you want with that content. I have heard this argument from an actual lawyer with an 'online media' practice, who sounded very convicing, but somehow, this seems to good to be true.

And, I have other sources that say that all content is copyrighted and that if you use it for commercial purposes without prior consent, then web site owner can sue you for stealing copyrighted content.

Does anyone have any definitive information as to how this works and which interpretation is correct?

 

[Theo]

Your post above, is your copyright the moment you created it. To release all rights to a piece of work you'd have to explicitly state that; not the opposite. Now, whether some creators care or not to chase after sites that copy their work, that's another story. RSS feeds by default are usually restricted to 255 characters or thereabouts. The problem exists with content scrapers that either copy/paste entire content or spider the articles, thus fetching the entire post. I have personally delivered several C&D notices making use of the DMCA act, to the web hosts of sites that decided to do exactly that. All of them remove it within hours or face to be shut down.