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Everyone loves full text RSS feeds; they make reading blogs so much more convenient. The downside for the creator of the feed is that RSS makes it incredibly easy for anyone to pull content from a feed and publish it on a website, without the explicit permission of the content creator. If you publish a full feed, all of your content can be put on someone else's site. There are now automated programs that search the web for feeds, aggregate them based on subject matter, and publish them onto websites with the sole purpose of earning a few Adsense bucks from those who find the site through search engine results.

Many bloggers won't care. But if you make any Adsense revenue yourself from the content on your site, or you enjoy high Google page rank for your pages, it might bother you to find the content that you spent hours creating appearing on these essentially scam sites.

Do you know that your work is protected by copyright law, even if you don't put a copyright notice on your site? It is, unless you have released your content under a Creative Commons license, and then it is subject to the terms of that license. Photography, original literary works (like the words on this entry), original graphics, are all protected. Methods, recipes, basic 1-2-3 instructions aren't. (They are protected under Patent law, if you choose to file for a patent.)

So, what to do.

Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic publishing over static publishing?

Elise Bauer, editor of Learning Movable Type, and Arvind Satyanarayan, author of Movalog, discuss some of the pros and cons of dynamic publishing. Non-techie luddite-wannabe Elise shies away from anything that seems like it might not be worth the effort and so far hasn't even tried dynamic publishing. Plugin creator and MT hack-master Arvind has embraced dynamic publishing with his usual boundless enthusiasm. Let's see if he can convince Elise...