Trademark blogger says: "To argue that the creation of a RSS feed impliedly allows this type of uncontrolled commercial re-use is to argue that RSS strips all content of effective copyright protection.
I have not seen a compelling legal or policy argument as to why all RSS content should be public domain in this way.
HTML content isn't automatically public content.
The implied license is for the user's browser to make the copy necessary to read the content.
You can't re-purpose HTML content without consent.
As far as I can see, from a copyright point of view, the only thing different about RSS content is that the template formatting isn't part of the work."
This guy's got a good point.
You have all of these RSS entrepreneurs running around trying to create "business models" (cough, what a trite proposition, eh?) and they're all basing their hoped-for big payday on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of "free content" sources served up by all the weblogs in the so-called blogosphere.
If they tried to aggregate all the big media and news sites they'd get sued out of existence.
So what gives them the right to seek profit off of people who are publishing something for free?
Nothing.
I've said it before: I will happily pay to use a service like Bloglines; their profit should come from providing a service.
But if an aggregator like Bloglines, or Feedburner, or Newsgator, to name a few, makes a dollar off of someone's weblog, by serving up contextual ads, for example, then don't they owe that blogger, say, a nickel?