Protecting RSS Feeds from Theft

Paul has come up with a cool way to put off those wanting to rip off your content by republishing your full RSS feed -

he’s found a way for WordPress bloggers to insert a copyright notice into the feed so that it appears on any site using your content.

Anyway, for other bloggers using WordPress who want to throw a scare into the scrapemasters who swipe their stuff and use it as spam, I took the liberty of modifying the wp-rss2.php file so it includes a visible copyright notice in every post in the feed.

First thing your (RSS) readers will see is your excerpt from your post followed by a horisontal line and this underneath:

” 2005 YOUR-BLOG-URL.com This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you’re not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you’re looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact YOUR-CONTACT-DETAILS so we can take legal action immediately.”‘

Link: Protecting RSS

Reader Comments

Darren Rowse is the founder of ProBlogger.net, a blog about the many ways of adding an income stream to blogs.

Darren owns and writes a variety of blogs including Digital Photography Blog and Camera Phone
Zone. He is also a co-founder of the Breaking News Blog Collective.

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Liz K.
July 24, 2007 at 12:08 pm

Darren – I came across this post after looking at the WordPress forums. For the PHP-clueless copy & pasters like me, do you mind sharing the code of your wp-rss2.php file so we know exactly where to put the copyright warning that you used?