My guess is you probably have downloaded music files for free. You were probably all for the use of free trade on the internet. What about the blogs such as Engadget who use info from other blogs and still make money from advertisers. Why are you not upset with them?

I saw what Shyftr is doing and it seems to me that you are more jealous then upset. If you are publishing your blog to rss feeds, you are esentially allowing people to use it for free. If you don’t like where it is headed, then turn off the rss feeds on your blog!

I do laud Shyftr for making strives toward protecting publisher rights; I’m simply saying that I’m still uncomfortable with what they’re doing even with those further changes made.

I’m not sure what illegal music downloads and “free trade” on the Internet has to do with this issue. And I hadn’t heard about Engadget “using info from other blogs” to make money — what’s that about?

I don’t think what when you offer an RSS feed that the publisher is “essentially allowing people to use it for free.” It’s a service that lets people pull the content of a site into an RSS reader.

The expectation is that this is a private or semi-private experience. Publishers can count the number of RSS subscribers they have and advertise to those readers if they wish (I don’t do this at the moment, by the way). This readership can be counted as a core subscriber base for a website.

Further, the expectation is that when readers of the RSS feed wish to comment on the story, that they will click back to the original source to do so, interacting with the publisher and other commenters.

Shyftr’s current model, even with the changes they’ve made, doesn’t go far enough in my view in allaying these concerns.

Others will surely disagree with this opinion but I reserve the right (still) to voice it on my own web publication.