First off let me say I don’t know the answer either but this certainly opens up a can of worms. Reading through the Atom 1.0 spec and the RSS 2.0 spec it seems Atom 1.0 may possibly have some of the answers here regarding rights and re-use.

1. Atomalso has support for aggregated feeds, where entries from multiple different feeds are combined, with pointers back to the feed they came from.

2. Below is an AtomEntry and it has elements for , and most importantly as an example of a pointer. This I think this maybe similar to the Trackback feature for Posts?

*atomEntry =
element atom:entry {
atomCommonAttributes,
atomAuthor
& atomCategory
& atomContent
& atomContributor
& atomId
& atomLink
& atomPublished
& atomRights
& atomSource
& atomSummary
& atomTitle
& atomUpdated
& extensionElement

Atom has the ability to reference entry content by URI. Below for instance, illustrates how an Atom feed for a photo weblog might appear. The element references each individual photograph in the blog. The summary element provides a caption for the image. The element could also be a reference pointer back the originator just as newspapers and BBC websites do with their images.

*
http://www.example.org/pictures
My Picture Gallery
2005-08-10T15:00:00Z

Sam K Sethi

http://www.example.org/entries/1
Trip to San Francisco

2005-08-10T15:00:00Z
A picture of my hotel room in San Francisco

http://www.example.org/entries/2
My new car

2005-08-10T12:00:00Z
A picture of my new car

*

3. Also Included in Atom 1.0, there is the support for XML Digital Signature on entries. It might be possible to place a digital signature on the image object in the original feed. Again would this stop the image being repurposed in another feed. I do not know as have not tried this.

4. Atom can also use the rel tag which is coming very popular for many things including XFN social networking but because Atom has rel support for:

* — Identifies an alternate version of the feed or entry e.g the originating webpage?
* — Identifies a resource that is described in some way by the content of the entry
* — Identifies a resource that provided the information contained in the feed or entry; for example, if the entry was distributed through an online aggregation service. i.e Google News

It is this last one that might once again be a way to provide a reference pointer back to the originator.

Or maybe like Direct Marketing with its default opt out clause you could you also create a default option using the *rel= . So just as we have *rel=”nofollow” we could have *rel=”norights”.

Then the user would have to implicitly create a relationship with the originating source i.e tick a box or accept some form of license/cookie. I doubt this would ever work as we would have empty image boxes in feeds everywhere. But I think people would never click on the image.

6. Extended Atom might fix the problem. Namespace extensions involve mixing new XML elements and attributes with the core Atom elements. For example, Atom defines elements that describe the moment when an entry was created and when the entry was published. However, imagine an application that produces entries whose content must expire at a given point in time (for example, a feed representing special sale offers or a weekly top-ten list). Atom does not provide any core elements that can be used to specify an expiration date. It is possible, however, to declare such an element in a separate namespace and include it in the Atom feed. Consumers of the feed who are not aware of the expiration extension element can simply choose to ignore it. But this might let the originator have an expiration on their content thus preventing its reuse beyond a certain period.

7. Also there are two media extensions that I know very little about mediaRSS from Yahoo and the Apple Extended Chapter extensions. Apple’s extensions are great but have nothing at the moment to do with the issue of rights we are discussing here other than to possibly in the future the chapters might show the originator or copyright next to each element of an aggregated RSS feed and the mediaRSS extension might come up woth something in regard ot licensing of content.

8. And finally and sadly Google News is only being published with Atom 0.3 feeds at the moment. I’m surprised they didn’t go ahead and use Atom 1.0 instead of Atom 0.3, but I guess they will soon.

What was funnier was Dave Winer’s reaction who is quite predictable. He attempted to chide Google for using the generic term “News feeds” rather than “RSS”.

In Dave’s words, “Like it or not… the technology is called RSS…. Like it or not … the format is RSS 2.0″. This, of course, is incorrect. RSS is one very popular way of publishing syndicated feeds, but it is not the only way and it’s not the only format. The technology is called syndicated feeds. The format is RSS and/or Atom. I think based on my research and work with both Atom will win out as people start to ask questions like yours Ben and find RSS 2.0 is not up to the mark.

Sam

P.S Found this reference below which made me smile. Please delete out the elements of this comment as it is far too long. i will probably right the same post on my site.

Aug 2005 Kembrew McLeod is a self-professed prankster. In 1998 he trademarked the phrase “Freedom of Expression®” as a comment on how the intellectual property law is being used to fence off culture and restrict the way in which people can express their ideas. He is the author of two books: “Owning Culture” and, most recently, “Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity”.

Ben, maybe that is the porblem in the first place!

Google could argue that news websites could, if they felt so incline, stop Google from aggregating its image by simply using an appropriate robots.txt, which Google obeys. That could even allow or disallow certain images if neccessary.

This wouldn’t work because Google parse and spider the HTML pages to obtain the img source urls, not the img binary files themselves.

So doing a no-follow on an /img/ directory wouldn’t stop this.

Ben: Sure, done.

(And delete this one to save my embarassment)

Ben: Er, no!

The images, as you rightly point out, are a different issue though.

Google could argue that news websites could, if they felt so incline, stop Google from aggregating its image by simply using an appropriate robots.txt, which Google obeys. That could even allow or disallow certain images if neccessary.