RSS Feeds and Splogs -- a legal view

Note: I am a lawyer in Arizona but nothing I say here should be taken as
legal advice particularly about any specific legal issue or problem. If
you need legal advice, please consult a lawyer in the jurisdiction
where you live. I haven't been on TV for many years, but when I was, I
was on TV as a lawyer.

In a recent post John Newmark of TransylvanianDutch
raised a very
interesting issue involving RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds
and feed readers such as Roots Feed. He
included a number of links to sites questioning the practice of
aggregation feeds and questioning the legality. Please read his post
before reading the rest of mine, then you will know what I am talking
about.

The Federal District Courts have original jurisdiction in all copyright
cases. This means that if you want to sue someone for a copyright
violation, you have to do so in a Federal District Court not a local
state or county court. This usually means that filing a copyright suit
is almost always more expensive and time consuming than filing in a
local court. So, I decided to check out the cases that had been filed in
Federal Courts about RSS. Guess what? There are only four (4) cases in
the entire court system that even mention RSS feeds.

Read more about the cases...