No more RSS feed from Carlos Miller & Photography Is Not a Crime

I've disabled the RSS feed for Carlos Miller & Photography Is Not a Crime (PINAC) because in three of his last four blog posts, he took someone else's video (one from Facebook, two from YouTube) and uploaded them to YouTube as his own.

RSS feeds arrive with the videos already embedded in HTML code, and this HTML code is automatically discarded since HTML is not allowed in XenForo posts. To make the posts more readable, I've made a habit of editing them to restore the videos in the BB Code format that our forum software accepts.

As I did this, I noticed a recent trend: All the videos were now posted under the name "Carlos Miller" and being run with ads.

Apparently the self-appointed champion of 1st amendment rights doesn't extend his enthusiasm to copyright law and the protection of the intellectual property rights of others.

 

It appears that Carlog got the hint, so I'm re-enabling his RSS feed. His last 4 or 5 posts that included YouTube videos have referenced the originals.

I'll me monitoring it, since XF actually tosses the embedded videos when the feed arrives and I have to edit the posts to restore them in the proper (UBB code) way.

 

Mike,

I just came across this thread now and I have to say, you have one (expletive deleted) of a nerve to trash me on your forums when you've been using my content in its entirety for months, if not years, to increase your traffic.

I realize it's probably my fault for setting the RSS feed in a way where my entire articles end up posted on your site as if I was a Travel Underground staff writer, so I will be putting a stop to that.

As far as using those videos on my Youtube site, it was simply a matter of ensuring the videos remain on my site as way too many people end up deleting controversial videos after being pressured by police.

 

Nice grand entry, Carlos, profanity & all!

It was still theft & it was still unethical. There's no excuse for taking other people's work and reposting it as your own, period. It deprives the original videographer of both the views & his ad income. However, as I noted, you did quit doing that after a small number of posts, and I doubt it was just coincidence.

As far as the RSS feed is concerned, it's clearly shown as a feed with the RSS symbol as the avatar and with a link back to your site in every post from the feed. You actually have quite a following here that you probably wouldn't have otherwise.

If you want to change it, suit yourself. As long as what's provided is enough of a synopsis that the readers know what the subject is and can make an intelligent decision as to whether to click on the link, I'll keep it. I've declined to set up RSS feeds to a couple otherwise good sites where their limited RSS feeds only provide a few lines of chatter and convey little useful information as to what a post is actually about. Just make those first couple sentences count.

 

The feed is a bit of a moot issue at the moment given that it's been broken for 7-10 days: FireFox returns null output, Opera reports parsing errors, Travel Underground's RSS handler is not making posts (don't know what's its complaint is).

 

The profane word that I used was the opposite of heaven, which is pretty mild, if you even want to call it profanity, but obviously your site has rigid standards.

The RSS feed was meant to serve readers who use these feeds to read their daily compilation of news sites.

I didn't set it up to allow other sites to post my articles in their entirety for their own readers where they don't even have to click to my site to read the full article.

Surely you would understand that considering how high and mighty you got over the Youtube issue.

"It deprives the original videographer of both the views & his ad income."

Your regular use of my content has done just that, but I acknowledge, it's my mistake. I tend to neglect little issues like this while focusing on keeping the blog updated, but I obviously need to start paying more attention.

The reason the RSS feed is broken at the moment is because I switched hosts last week, which led to all kinds of problems I'm still dealing with.

In fact, that's how I came across this thread. I was Googling in search of answers to fix the RSS feed because it just disappeared along with a lot of other items during the switch.

 

Your feed didn't disappear, rather the XML that is created for it is considered invalid. If you look at it with Opera, you will see something but not quite a functional feed.

Google "RSS validator"; the one I use is the first one that comes up: http://validator.w3.org/feed/

 

Good news is that Carlos fixed his RSS feed to work with some readers.

Bad news is that it still contains a parsing error that causes most readers to choke. Once that particular article ages out, we should start seeing the feed here again. Any articles that don't eventually show up here I will reblog from their original sources.

The error, incidentally, is in the full text of one of his articles. Yes, indeed, he's still sending out the full text, although it won't necessarily appear in all readers. As for how it appears here, we'll just have to wait for the article with the error to age out & then we'll see.