What is Hatch's Hit List? Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has introduced the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (IICA, née INDUCE Act) in the Senate. The bill would make it illegal to "intentionally induce" copyright infringement, but is worded so broadly that it would have all sorts of unintended consequences, one of which is to severely limit, cripple or kill innovation in many different fields. Hatch's Hit List is a daily exploration of some of the technologies and fields that the bill would likely affect. See also, Introducing Hatch's Hit List and the Hatch's Hit List Archives. Send list suggestions to ernest.miller 8T aya.yale.edu.
Today on Hatch's Hit List: FeedBurner
Let's face facts: many bloggers infringe copyrights. Often.
Fair use, schmair use. Bloggers copy works that don't belong to them, for example, large swaths of copyrighted newspaper articles with minimal commentary or criticism. Blogs are a veritable Wild Wild West of piracy.
One of the more devious aspects of blogging is the RSS feed that provides notification when new copyright infringements are available. With the use of "news readers" copyright violaters can easily keep track of the latest violations on hundreds of websites.
And now we have a company, FeedBurner, that makes RSS feeds even more efficient and effective at violating copyright (About FeedBurner):
FeedBurner is an RSS/Atom post-processing service that allows publishers to enhance their feeds in a variety of interesting and powerful ways. By republishing their feeds through FeedBurner, publishers gain detailed feed statistics, maximum feed format compatibility, "shockproofing" to absorb bandwidth spikes, and more.
Absorb the bandwidth spikes of new infringement, morelike.
For some reason, perhaps because they actually want to encourage copyright infringement, FeedBurner's terms of service says nothing about users of the service violating copyright law. There is no warning that publishing an RSS feed might be a violation of the exclusive right of distribution. As we all know, there must be warnings about infringement whenever they might occur. Without constant warnings, people are likely to violate copyright by accident, or something.
Heck, anyone can use this service with no real accountability, for free - how much of an inducement is that?
Want to know more about the INDUCE Act?
Please see LawMeme's well-organized index to everything I've written on the topic, including Hatch's Hit List: The LawMeme Reader's Guide to Ernie Miller's Guide to the INDUCE Act.
Ernest Miller pursues research and writing on cyberlaw, intellectual property, and First Amendment issues. Mr. Miller attended the U.S. Naval Academy before attending Yale Law School, where he was president and co-founder of the Law and Technology Society, and founded the technology law and policy news site LawMeme. He is a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
Ernest Miller's blog postings can also be found @
