Creating a for-profit RSS Aggregator - legal? - Business and Legal

#1
tangent719

Posted 13 December 2011 - 05:37 PM

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Hi I am thinking about creating a RSS News Feed Aggregator. I am wondering, if I read the RSS feeds of news sites and post the links from the feed will I be legally liable for copyright infringement on the RSS feed? I would seek profit (via ads on the link listing page and other means) but I would not put an advertisement behind a news link (user clicks the link from the RSS and goes straight to the content site). I would link directly to the site (maybe redirect after I record that the user clicked the article).

#2
WingedPanther

Posted 14 December 2011 - 04:15 PM

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It depends on how you do it. Drudgereport.com is a news aggregator, but all it does is link to the actual news articles.

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#3
tangent719

Posted 18 December 2011 - 11:18 AM

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That's pretty much what I want to do. It's pretty simple, it would work like this:

I query RSS feed, read article info.
I display a page with a bunch of links to articles.
The link doesn't go directly to the article. It goes back to my server, where the article viewing is recorded.
My server redirects the user to the article.

I know there are legal issues with showing an ad when a user clicks on a RSS-fed link, but that's not my plan. The user click would go back to my server but the user is then redirected on to the content. Does this sound legal? Also, this is on a for-profit website.