BBC News dipped its toe in the RSS waters some time ago, but attached a Draconian set of conditions to its license that forbade you from aggregating their RSS onto your site. Now they've relaxed the license somewhat, so you can include the BBC feed on your site, albeit with a bunch of longwinded conditions about how you are permitted to caption it.
It's really cool that the BBC is opening up, but I have this lurking question:
Why do we need a license for this at all? If you look at a web-page, no one argues that you need a "license" to read it. The act of putting it on the web implies a license to read it in a web-browser. RSS aggregated on other web-sites is what RSS is for, it's (partly) why it was invented. When you put up an RSS link, why shouldn't we all assume an implied license to aggregate, read, download, spindle, fold and mutilate it just the same way that we assume a license to download web-pages, view their source, cache them, block their popups and images and so forth?
Should we pander to delusions about RSS being for something other than aggregating and republishing? Or should we ignore RSS licenses in the same way that we ignore "Linking policies" and "Terms of service?" Maybe we need an early precedent now that sets out that RSS is for aggregating.
