The original position was wrong. That’s the reason behind the policy change and for the hooplah resulting from my post.

Shahid, no need to apologise for assuming that I’m male. It’s not an uncommon misconception – even the British Medical Association News thinks I’m male! I guess female surgical registrars are still a rarity.

Words like “temporary” and “excerpts” mean nothing. We all know that Google caches everything in full forever, but looks like they successfully argued that dropping a few little pieces of a page creates “excerpts”. I can as well say that even the “full” posts are excerpts too, since they do not include the entire blog site scaffolding.

USENET postings and RSS feeds have more in common than you think. Both are published by the author with explicit intent for distribution.

But this is the matter from purely legalistic perspective. I do not find it worth a fight.

I agree with you on one thing though – there is not enough specificity under current legislation or case law (though I can’t claim to have read all of it). All this is just academic until there is a legal challenge.

You can argue legal points all you want. The problem is there is not enough specificity under the current law, so it is pretty much useless.

What everybody needs is a fresh look at the whole policy landscape for “mashosphere”, as described in the WebMoney article I referenced above.

TMBN has always been explicit that our goal is not only to be a traffic hub for members’ sites but build community at (www.healthvoices.com).

So yes, we are more than a “dumb” aggregator. We are building a feature-rich intelligent community site.

Google wins a court battle

While I certainly don’t like aggregators putting up my entire posts I guess I can’t really complain (or mind) since I am “authorizing” it by including my entire post in a feed.

I don’t believe that I am giving a condition-free license to use my content however anyone sees fit simply by publishing a feed. All of my content, including the full-post feed are released under specific conditions detailed in the license.

At first I thought that if we weren’t explicitly allowing it (via a license statement or something), aggregators should assume that we’re not authorizing it. But then, if we give our postings in a feed we’re explicitly saying it’s ok.

Actually copyright is automatically reserved once a work is created, and no notice is required in order to exercise the rights of authors protected by copyright. (See the comments here for further.) In my interpretation, anyone wishing to use the feed in excess of “fair use” (i.e. for commercial purposes) would have to obtain the permission of the blog author before redistributing content.

1) Quoting for the purpose of commenting is a well-established example of fair use of copyrighted materials.

No argument about copyright there. However, my comment was directed more as to what is the purpose of a separate comment section on an aggregator? It doesn’t drive traffic to member websites (which is one of your stated goals), and it doesn’t promote a unified discussion – there will be some comments on the original blog, and some comments on the aggregator. I doubt that the post author would ever visit the aggregator site to reply to comments there. Wouldn’t it be better to link to the comment section on the original poster’s blog?

2) We include both links to every item on our site (Permalinks) and the links back to original post (Sourcelinks). Both are listed clearly.

Yup, I see them both now. When I last looked, the sourcelink was not so obvious (you had to click the aggregators permalink or something, I don’t remember.) However, again, what is the purpose of a permalink pointing to a re-posted post? A permalink is to be a permanent and singular source of the content. If the point of TMBN is really to generate traffic for member sites, would it not be better to simply have a sourcelink back to the original post, rather than a permalink that attempts to falsely elevate TMBN’s PageRank? Other medical aggregators (i.e. Medlogs) d this (granted, they have an outgoing click counting mechanism, but they do not create seperate permalinks for every post.)

These points become moot for bloggers who publish only teasers in RSS feeds – which generate traffic to their sites. You have full control over your feeds.

But what if I want to provide full post feeds for reader’s personal use in desktop and web-based opt-in aggregators where the user actually has to subscribe to the feed (i.e. Bloglines), but I don’t want my content re-posted on a for-profit commercial aggregator without explicit permission?