The Trademark Blog: Martin Schwimmer still doesn’t get it. After being Scoblized and taking a little pounding in the blogosphere he offers back some very weak arguments regarding his original poorly thought out rant against bloglines. Marty essentially doesn’t think it’s right for bloglines to publish his RSS feed. Let’s examine Marty’s arguments.
1. “This was not an attack on RSS or full-text aggregators as a class. My concern is with a specific type of unauthorized commercial use of my feed.” So what Marty is saying is that if an RSS reader includes or plans to include ads it’s unauthorized for them to publish his feed. Bull, any company can put ads on/in their software at anytime. By the way Marty, Yahoo! has ads today here and now. Since bloglines might include advertising in the future and this is discussed this somehow makes this reader unauthorized whereas other readers that don’t discuss advertising (but very well may and would be within their rights to offer) are authorized. Marty you have no legal authority over any other software company and any and all RSS readers can/may include advertising in the future.
2. Bloglines is accumulating a list of your subscribers? Marty the last time that I checked I was the one who voluntarily gave my subscription information to bloglines. Further I’ve allowed them to publish it to the free world. This is my choice and I can supply my subscription information to anyone I want. People voluntarily supply their subscription information to bloglines. They are not coming on to your computer and stealing from you and any user that does not want their subscriptions known can choose not to use bloglines.
Here’s another thing to get your blood boiling Marty. Do you know that technorati is publishing a list of people that link to your site. Check it out. Oh my god! This is your private personal information. And, oh tell me it’s not true, they have ADVERTISING. What is this world coming to. After all you and you alone own the ip that is your readers minds, thoughts and actions. I don’t know, I might be pretty pissed if I were you. Scoble links to your rebuttal and it doesn’t have a big flashing box around the link in bold print, “Martin Schwimmer, the thinking man’s attorney.”
3. Can I record NBC TV’s VHF broadcast and re-distribute the feed. Uh Marty, you ever heard of TiVo? It’s this little thing that pauses live tv. Back when you went to Harvard (still finding very hard to believe) they didn’t have TiVo but today they do. Check it out sometime. Did you know that they are going to place TiVo advertisements over commercials when people fast forward them?
Marty, the RSS feed is being picked up and published as YOU publish it. If you want a little tag line, “Martin Schwimmer, the thinking man’s attorney” to be included in every post just write is as the first sentence of every post — bloglines will pick it up. YOU are the problem, NOT bloglines. If you have a problem with it, invent your own RSS format that includes everything exactly the way that you want it and your own corresponding reader that accomodates this. That way you and your two remaining readers will have a cool new toy.
As far as I’m concerned you are way off base here and personally if a site doesn’t offer an RSS feed I don’t read it. It’s as simple as that. That is my choice but again I’m sure my choice not to read your blog (even with an RSS feed) somehow makes me liable and implicit in the whole mess.
Bloglines is an amazing piece of software that has changed my life in serious and fundamental ways.
Robert Scoble offers continued coverage of this lunacy. If this were Slashdot I’d swear Schwimmer was flame bait.