Who changed the RSS feed text?

Earlier this year, WordPress took an update. And with that update, the RSS feed changed in a subtle–but critical–way.

The content of any blurb on an article in the feed includes this sentence: “This article appeared first in (name-of-blog) on (such-a-date).” (I added the emphasis here.)

What a presumptuous thing to do. My blog has a large stable of contributors, many of whom share content with me after they have published it elsewhere. One of my contributors noticed the “appeared first” phrase yesterday and she blew her stack. This gets into copyright and first-rights issues. Any of you who know anything about publishing and IP issues, knows what I’m talking about.

This is a bug, and I want to know how to fix it. I’ve already been all over www.remarpro.com looking for plugins that would give me direct control over the content of RSS, ATOM, and all other feeds. No joy. But that was all right as long as the text of the feed did not violate any copyright issues. Now it does, and I’m about to lose contributors over it, if not get involved in a lawsuit!!!