Is All Of This Legal?

fyi, all the images you are showing do not reside on your server (these are urls pointing to images in the RSS feed). I don’t know whether or not its legal or not..I just provide the plugin that if you want to bring in RSS feeds, you can…what people do with that is their business. Also, you can easily choose not to bring in the images if you want.

I manage a law office, along with running about 100 sites, many of which use this plugin. One of our sites was aggregating too much of the stories and did not have the option turned on to pay homage back to the original page. Our attorney was contacted by opposing counsel and we corrected the problem without incurring liability.

The legalities are still really fuzzy in this area. There are a few publications that have abused the idea of aggregation, and they have been embroiled in lawsuits. Mostly others are not bothered because it is generally considered legal if you aggregate the title and only a small snippet.

Take a look at Huffington Post, as they are an example of a publisher that aggregates some of their content.

When publishers use public-domain feeds from sources who encourage truncated republication for more traffic- with proper attribution links as Tom Peranteau points out- the feed sources benefit from increased clickthroughs and the publishers benefit from free microcontent. It’s a win-win mutually beneficial situation as Huffington Post has demonstrated beyond doubt.