Protect Your RSS Feed from Copying

Blog Logic is unhappy with bloggers and websites who pick up the RSS feed of hard working bloggers to steal and publish their work as a whole without building on it and giving credit. So what he proposes is -

“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.”

“The real power of this however, is the fact that when someone scrapes your feed and publishes it on their spam sites, that big old copyright/legal threat thingy will show up right on their web pages.”

He describes how to fix up the files of the RSS feed to show that notice beneath all feeds. That file will work with WordPress v.1.5 at present. You can fix up your own notice to the rss feed and determine how harsh you want to sound!