The RSS Blog

News and commentary from the RSS and OPML community.

Today, I notice that Microsoft has changed the licensing on the RSS search results. They use to be free to use in any manner you wanted, commercial or otherwise. Now the copyright has changed to...

Copyright © 2006 Microsoft. All rights reserved. These XML results may not be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner or for any purpose other than rendering MSN Search results within an RSS aggregator for your personal, non-commercial use. Any other use of these results requires express written permission from Microsoft Corporation. By accessing this web page or using these results in any manner whatsoever, you agree to be bound by the foregoing restrictions.

It seems that everybody is violating these terms of use. For instance, Rmail forwards the results to your email client and the results are rendered by your email client, which is likely not an RSS aggregator. Every RSS to email client is violating these terms. Additionally, if you use Rmail to forward your MSN search result to Gmail, then I'm in big trouble, because Gmail has ads and is clearly a commercial product. Further, any commercial RSS aggregator is also violating these terms. Sorry NewsGator. Sorry Bloglines. Sorry Rojo. Sorry Google Reader. These are commercial applications. They require written permission from Microsoft to display those results. I guess I have to start blocking MSN search results. Stupid lawyers.

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