I’ve set up my first two mashups using Yahoo pipes recently. Before I went ahead and made these humble experiments pubic, it had me thinking. Well, if I can combine our RSS feed with Flickr images, what’s to prevent others from doing things with our feed that we don’t intend?

After all, we specify – within our Podcast feed (not our plain rss just yet), using the <license> element, that this feed is made available under a creative commons license that specifically prohibits derivitive works.

Is a mashup a derivitive work? Seems like one to me.

I did a cursory search of the web and found an interesting article by Jonathan Bailey which suggests that rss feeds are, by definition, public domain protected, syndicated property and should be respected as such. (thanks for the correction).

He also describes three approaches for removing a feed from the yahoo pipes service.

I know this is not the time for locking up our content, but maybe it’s prudent that we change the license for our feeds to something that is more reflective of its actual purpose and use (although perhaps retain the NoDerivs part of the license as a sub-element of each item within the feed – as opposed to the feed iteself).