Syndication and Copyright: Is there an implied unrestricted license with a full-text RSS feed?

In response to someone who wants off his link blog, Scoble has a comment about aggregators in general, asserting that "[b]y publishing RSS as full text you're buying into a system where your words will be republished in a variety of ways."

Sorry, Robert, but you're wrong. Just because you publish something in a format that facilitates reuse doesn't mean you should be forced to relinquish all control over it. You seemed to acknowledge this in discussing why your link blog isn't "evil", but let me make this important point explicitly:

The content's medium alone does not eliminate the author's rights in that content.

In the Autolink discussion, I said that copyright exists to protect the content producer. The Constitution says that "Congress shall have Power . . . To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." In other words, we want to encourage people to create but, in order to achieve that goal, we will give the creators some ownership. (Actually, I may have given the wrong impression originally: copyright is really, or should be, an attempt to balance the rights of the producer and the consumer).

I am writing for fun and my goal is to publish (hopefully) interesting content that people want to read. I appreciate it when Robert links to me because it means more people will see that content. I am also happy when someone decides they like my content enough to subscribe, even if it's a "commercial" aggregator like Bloglines. But everyone may not feel the same way.

As a producer, I have the ability to define how others can use my content. If we want to encourage sites to syndicate their content, we have to ensure that they can prevent people from using content in ways they don't want to allow. This is at the heart of a lot of the Creative Commons licenses, including the Attribution-NonCommercial license I publish my content under.

This license basically says you can repurpose my content here as long as 1) you attribute the content to me and 2) don't use it for commercial purposes. In other words, I want to allow people like Scoble to post my content on his link blog, but I don't want someone taking my content and using it in a book.

That last scenario may seem like a far-fetched, but consider that Robert and Shel are publishing a full-text feed with chapters from The Red Couch. I wonder how Robert would feel if I took his content and published it myself? I wonder how his publisher, Wiley, would feel?

I would think, of all people, Robert would be in perhaps the best position to make the distinction on how content is used, and it's surprising to me that he chooses to ignore it.

Let me say that again: The content's medium alone does not eliminate the author's rights in that content.

This is also at the core of the blogger-as-journalist argument: It doesn't matter how you publish it, it matters how you create it..

The real problem is that anything that is digital - not just XML - is easily repurposed. Should XML be treated differently than HTML somehow? What if the HTML is well-formed? This mentality that "if I have it I can use it however I want" is exactly the mentality that makes the the record industry put DRM on everything.

Scoble's response: "OK, are five bloggers who want total control of their content gonna ruin it for everyone?"