This is a message sent my Matt Terenzio posted in another topic. As I
believe this is a topic worth discussing, I'm reposting it here :
I brought an issue up in the early days and got a few decent
responses and
a number of irrelevant attacks which I guess was because I was
considered
the RSSCloud guy on the PuSH list. Just thought I'd toss that in
here. ; )
But it had to do with the architecture of PubSubHubbub and
respecting
copyright.
At some point in a a widely grey area there is a line between
syndication
and unauthorized redistribution of content. I don't know where it
is and it
might even begin with the publishers intention or implicit license
they
give by making a feed available.
While I tend to lean toward more open licenses for content, not
everyone
does. And because hubs can daisy chain content down lines, whether
or not
your hub is respectful might not mean you aren't part of a
questionable
distribution chain.
That last part is certainly not the strong part of what I'm
saying. Just
saying we should think about what it means to redistribute parts
of the web
that owners might not have intended for syndication.
Aside from that concern which I'm sure you have already thunk
about, I
think it has incredible potential with the explosion of semantic
web data
arriving on the web.
So much so that I could see feeds being unnecessary for many sites
since
all the pages are marked up well enough that the description of
the content
is just as easily digestible from the web page as it was from the
feeds.
Almost, at least, though there would still be the overhead of the
crawl, I
guess. But for many blog style sites, a sematically marked up home
page is
practically as good as a feed.
