Off Wing Opinion
Off Wing Opinion


November 16, 2005

Mr. Pheer: RSS Feed Hijacker


For some time now, more than a few of my readers have asked me why I provide an excerpt, rather than the text of an entire post in my RSS feed. To tell the truth, I really hadn't thought about it before a couple of months ago, as I'm more of a writer than a coder, and as you can see at the bottom of the blog, I didn't design Off Wing myself.

This guy is the reason. So far, he's victimized my friends James Mirtle and Steve Ovadia. Click here, here and here for more details.

To say I'm annoyed by this would be an understatement, and I'd like to try to do something about it. If the DMCA can protect Time Warner, it ought to be able to protect guys like Jim and Steve as well.

I know for a fact that we have some intellectual property attorneys out there. Any advice you could give in this regard would be much appreciated.

In the meantime, I'm telling everyone I know about this guy.



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Comments

You probably ought to remove his link. Ugh.

Posted by: [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 16, 2005 08:15 AM

Dude Pheer, your entire site concept is morally bankrupt.

Posted by: [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 16, 2005 09:51 AM

Eric,

There's nothing non-lawyerly you can do to make that guy stop cribbing other people's writing (which I'm assuming is what he's doing?).

However, I will say that I could steal the text of your blog and put it up on my own site, with or without full-text feeds. Yes, it would be slightly more work, but we're talking 20 minutes instead of 5 minutes.

Obviously, I'm a fan of full-text feeds.

Peace
Bill Mill
bill.mill@gmail.com

Posted by: [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 16, 2005 06:20 PM

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