There's been a lot of noise around RSS and DRM in the blogosphere - when I read this post by Robert Scoble, i felt, like he did :

"Yesterday was a sad day for me. It was the day that DRM in RSS was born." 

For me its really simple, tell me if I am naive.  I strongly feel, as the author of a piece or a blog, the choice is mine.  If I offer RSS feeds off my site or blog, I do it because I want people to subscribe to it.  If they aggregate content (with attribution of course) onto their sites or blogs I am happy.  Why do I offer the feeds - because I want people to read what I am saying, I want them to link to it, I want to encourage conversations around it, I want them to add to and take thoughts forward.  If they aggregate my thoughts, I don't have a problem with it either.  If someone makes money from aggregations of posts, let them, so long as they attribute the thought/post to me.  It always comes around.

If I am working on stuff I don't want people to talk about or use, I simply donot provide an RSS feed for it, or have it up on a public site.  I'm not naive to believe that every reader of mine will take the effort of visiting my blog everytime there is an update.    

RSS daddies, please don't let them kill it for us with DRM.  Let the author of the blog who is the real content provider decide on his or her rules of engagement.

When we were working with WikiNews for the Tsunamihelp wiki, we ran into some issues over what we were 'allowed' to put up on the wiki pages.  One of the things we were cautioned that we were infringing upon their policies on copyright, as we were pasting content from newspaper and magazine articles (with appropriate attribution of course). This was important to us as they were an important source of information around aid and relief, and we were building a clearinghouse for any information around this area. 

Fair enough if that is their policy, I respect it.  But I don't need to live with it, do I ?  Although there were some nice folk there who really listened and were willing to bend over to help, we had very little time to debate this with them. Still we had options. So we simply opted out of using that space and transferred the wiki on our own servers so we could control content ourselves.  And I must acknowledge here that many of the folk at WikiMedia were just gems and helped ease the transfer.  

On a related note, I attended a short bit of the second of  Jerry's series of Yi-Tan calls on A World Without DRM and despite a not-so-hot connection and the late hour for me, thought it was really interesting.  The discussion is broader than RSS and DRM, still i hope we can touch upon it too, and I look forward to participating more soon.