John Panzer of AOL has been writing about feed licensing. His recommendation:

So, here’s my new summary, which is shorter but more complicated:

• Support and promote feed standards for embedded licenses.
• Allow fair use for unlicensed feed content.

You’ll need to consult your legal department on what fair use is in each case, and figure out how to deal with international jurisdictions too.

All of which makes embedding licenses in feeds even more important.

Thanks John for linking to our page on license discovery in feeds, which references license metadata standards for RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 and describes heuristics for finding licensing information when not included directly in a feed.

If you’re a developer of feed-publishing software (most obviously blog software, but everything produces feeds these days) please consider including license metadata in published feeds. If you’re a developer of feed-consuming software (most obviously feed readers and aggregators) please consider making license information user visible.